Help with search patterns

Help & Support
1

Hi all,
I'm trying to find a fairly simple string in plain text files using the Opus search dialog, and despite the fact that the string does exist in the files, Opus doesn't seem to be able to find it.

What I'm searching for is:

in ['

So that's the letter 'i', the letter 'n', a space, a left bracket, and a single quote.

Entering this in the search text field, and using a filename pattern of *.pas, and searching in the parent folder of around 100 files (in various subfolders) that contain that string, Opus returns zero matches. I haven't got any other weird filtering in place, and all files are readable and so on.

If I search for the string without the final quote, no results.
If I search for the string without the bracket and the quote, Opus finds all the matching files (which of course is too many for what I'm looking for).

I've looked in the help and the FAQ, and I can't seem to find any information regarding search patterns that apply to the edit box in question. I realise that both the quote character and the bracket character are "special" in many ways, but I can't find a way to make them non-special in this instance. FWIW, Copernic and JPSoft's TCMD find functions barf on the same string, but there are escape characters I can use to make them do the right thing. I don't seem to be able to find the "arm-twisting" escape-characters in Opus.

Any ideas, thoughts, or suggestions would be most welcome.

And, as always, if I'm just plain missing the answer, please be gentle.

2

You seem to know what the problem is already, and also what the solution is. The apostrophe (single-quote) is the escape character (and this is actually stated in the manual). I'll leave the obvious next step up to you :slight_smile:

3

Thanks Tanis, I didn't RTFM (I have to get over the paper manual hangup).

Sure enough in the Appendix, there's the search pattern details, large as life.

Could I request that this info be added to the next help file? That's where I search first, and there's nothing in there about the search text options... And the CHM format won't let me search for an actual apostrophe or any of the other "juicy" characters...

Thanks for the pointer!

[EDIT]
Hmmmm. Actually, the escape syntax doesn't seem to work, either, or at least, not the way I'm using it.

In my case, I tried:

in '[ ''

intending to escape the bracket character and the quote character itself, but that didn't work (no results returned), then

in \[\' (trying to use regexp type escapes, but ditto)
and even

in \'[\' (escaping the escape to escape the bracket), or

in '\'\'\'[ (escaping the escape character to escape the escape character to escape the bracket, which is just me being pig-headed - I can see infinite recursion from here... :slight_smile:
.

Where am I going wrong?

4

There also doesn't seem to be any context for the pattern matching and standard regexp in the manual - every example relates to filenames, not text per se. Could this be expanded in a future revision?

I also note in passing that none of the examples actually use the quote as an escape character, perhaps that could also be explained with an example?

Oh, and I know I can do the search using regexp escaped hex characters, but there has to be an easier way than going to another application to look up the ASCII value of a right bracket, right?

5

Ah - I found the advanced tab and entered a regexp there, that's why it wasn't returning any results. Sorry, I just assumed that I could use the same kind of expression in the "simple" mode...