Introduction

Normally, when you search for a sub-string in a string, the match should be exact. So if we search for a sub-string abc , then the string being searched should contain these exact letters in the same sequence for a match to be found. We can extend this kind of search to a case insensitive search where the sub-string abc will find strings like Abc , ABC etc. That is, the case is ignored but the sequence of the letters should be exactly the same. Sometimes, a case insensitive search is also not enough. For example, if we want to search for numeric digit, then we basically end up searching for each digit independently. This is where regular expressions come in to our help and XReplace-32 gives you the power of regular expressions.

Regular expressions are text patterns that are used for string matching. Regular expressions are strings that contains a mix of plain text and special characters to indicate what kind of matching to do. In this section, you will find a brief tutorial on using regular expressions.