Regular Expressions Support

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Some features, such as file search, SQL Editor search, and Browser list filtering, support the use of regular expressions. This provides flexibility in in searches and other situations in which text string qualification is required.

Detailed documentation on regular expressions is beyond the scope of this document. For descriptions of syntax and metacharacters, consult third-party documentation on the regular expressions standard. The following table provides short descriptions of the most commonly used regular expression metacharacters used with DBArtisan features:

Metacharacter	Description
.	Matches any single character.
*	Matches zero or more characters.
+	Matches one or more characters.
^	The start of a string.
$	The end of a string.
\b	Word boundary.
\d, \w and \s	Shorthand character classes matching digits, word characters (letters, digits, and underscores), and whitespace (spaces, tabs, and line breaks).
\D, \W and \S	Negated versions of the above that should only be used outside character classes.
[ ]	Matches any one character enclosed between the square brackets.
[^ ]	Matches any character NOT enclosed between the square brackets.
{}	Matches aspecified number of repetations. For example ab{2,4} matches abb, abbb, and abbbb.
|	OR.
\	Escape special character.
()	Tag expression.
\s	Space or Tab.

In the case of some specific features, regular expression usage must be enabled or configured. For more information, see the DBArtisan feature topics for details:

• Find/Replace Options in Coding Environments
• Find in Files

• Filtering columns in Database Object Displays