Find using "(" and ")" characters

Help & Support
1

Hello everyone,

For some inexplicable reason my pictures folder has been littered with some copies of pictures that were already in the folder. It has affected some files and not others, so I have a seemingly random set of duplicated files. The duplicated files are easy to spot because the filename is exactly the same except that it has the characters (1) in it. So, for example, if I had a file named Brian.jpg before then the duplicate is named Brian (1).jpg. My feeling is that iTunes has been meddling in there, which I will declare here to be the most infuriating application ever written and I have since banished it from my system for causing chaos in my otherwise meticulously organised music folder. Anyway, I digress...

I thought I'd use Dopus to get rid of my duplicate picture files. It would seem an easy task - just use the find panel to return a match of all files with the character sequence (1) in them. But, it appears to me that the Dopus find panel does not accept a ( or a ) character as part of its search criteria. I searched for "(1)" in my pictures folder and returned a whole load of files that had the number 1 in them, not just those files with the characters "(1)" in them. I also tried (1) with the same result.
After that I tried searching for just the ( character on its own, hoping that it would return all files with a ( character in the filename. Alas, there are no results returned at all for this search.

So... does anyone have any ideas? Am I doing something wrong, or is there a reason why Dopus does not accept bracket characters as part of a filename search?

Thanks in advance.

Brian

2

PS: Just to be clear (even though I don't seem to have been in my original post), where I've used quote (") characters these were to quote the search string entered, and were not actually entered as part of the search itself.

3

You need to escape special characters like ( and ) in Opus. To do so, put a ' before the special character.

For example you could use something like this:

*'(*')*

To find all file names that contain opening and closing parenthesis (providing you have the wildcard option enabled).

4

John,

Thanks very much indeed for your response. I have tried your escape sequences and have had success with them.

However, your usage of the * wildcard has intrigued me. It was my previous understanding that usage of the * wildcard was restricted to, for example, the following:

1: .jpg, which would return all filenames ending in .jpg
2: hello, which would return all filenames starting in hello
3: hello, which would return all filenames with the contiguous characters "hello" in them.

Your usage of the asterix wildcard seems to go a bit further than that. You've used '(')* to return all filenames with a ( and a ) somewhere in the filename... is this correct? I've tried it out and it seems to work. Now my only problem is understanding it!!!

I'm going to go away and see if I can get my head around that. Perhaps a google search on wildcards will help me out...

Thanks again,

Brian

5

Or read the section in the Opus manual about pattern matching :slight_smile:

6

[quote="BrianH"]John,

Thanks very much indeed for your response. I have tried your escape sequences and have had success with them.

However, your usage of the * wildcard has intrigued me. It was my previous understanding that usage of the * wildcard was restricted to, for example, the following:

1: .jpg, which would return all filenames ending in .jpg
2: hello, which would return all filenames starting in hello
3: hello, which would return all filenames with the contiguous characters "hello" in them.

Your usage of the asterix wildcard seems to go a bit further than that. You've used '(')* to return all filenames with a ( and a ) somewhere in the filename... is this correct? I've tried it out and it seems to work. Now my only problem is understanding it!!!

I'm going to go away and see if I can get my head around that. Perhaps a google search on wildcards will help me out...

Thanks again,

Brian[/quote]

It seems clear to me that in all the cases you have cited, the asterisk represents "any number of any characters in any combination".

In your case of 2: hello*, which would return all filenames starting in hello, that's true because you get "hello" followed by anything.

Now let's break down '(')* into these parts:

[ul]* means any number of any characters[/ul]
[ul]`( means a single ( following whatever matched the asterisk[/ul]
[ul]* means more characters following the single ([/ul]
[ul]') means a single ) following all that[/ul]
[ul]and finally * means any more characters following all of the above[/ul]