Creating Advanced Generic Queries
An advanced generic query begins and ends with a forward slash (/). The characters or character combinations explained below have special meaning in a query:
- \
- The escape character - the following character is to be treated as a literal character.
- [...]
- Matches any one character between the brackets. A range of characters can be indicated by a
hyphen; for example, /[a-f]/ matches any character between a and f inclusive.
- [^...]
- Matches any one character not between the brackets.
- .
- Matches any character.
- \w
- Matches any word character - equivalent to [a-zA-Z0-9].
- \d
- Matches any digit - equivalent to [0-9].
- ?
- Matches zero or one occurrence of the previous item.
- +
- Matches one or more occurrences of the previous item.
- *
- Matches zero or more occurrences of the previous item.
- {n,m}
- Matches the previous item at least n times but no more than m times.
- {n}
- Matches the previous item exactly n times.