Filter bar: use of regular expression

Help & Support
1

I use the "Filter Field" a lot, which seems to simply use the "filter bar". My problem is how to search for non-standard characters or to use regular expression searches to find files. eg I have 2,000 files in a folder and need to find those with a "." or two spaces " " or a left bracket "[" within the file name. Is there a way to use RE searches in the filter bar to do this? Searching for a "." is a particular issue as there is one in most files before the extension (which i am not interested in).

In RE searches the "" Escapes the special meaning of the expressions, so that they can be matched as literal characters. Hence, to match a literal "[", one would use "[" etc etc. Sadly, this does not seem to happen in the filter field, which seems to use text only to search/filter

Is there an alternative way to do this? The Find Panel does not seem to use RE either. ie I would like to search a long list of files in a folder (or flatview including subfolders) for files containing special characters like *, ., [, {, _, -, spaces.

2

The Find panel can use RegExps via the Advanced tab, FWIW.

But I don't think you need RegExps for this as the basic wildcard syntax in Opus should be enough.

(Windows filenames cannot contain * so we can ignore that character.)

A wildcard like this is probably what you want:

(.|[|{|_|-| ).*

That will find any filename containing . [ { _ - or two spaces in a row, with another . afterwards.

(So it won't work with most folders, FWIW, but I assume we're talking about files with extensions here, from the dot stuff.)

3

Thanks a lot Leo that info provides me with an alternative strategy.

Firstly I forgot that you can use RegExp in the Find panel (should have known).
Secondly, I guess I did not know how to use the wildcard syntax efficiently: nesting, bracketing, ordering etc. Your one example does not work for me at all, but it provided me enough inspiration to start playing around with it for myself. My first attempts are working for now!! I'll keep playing.

Are you saying that the RegExp approach won't work in the filter bar? or just that you don't know if it does or not?

PS - sleep! Do you ever??

4

I didn't say anything about RegExps in the filter bar. :slight_smile:

The filter bar doesn't support RegExps so they won't work there.