1. ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
CHRISTOPHER ZACK| OMNIUPDATE

2. Agenda Find & Replace History of Regular Expressions
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Find & Replace
History of Regular Expressions
Literal Character Search
Special Characters
Period
Quantifiers
Parentheses
Square Brackets
Shorthand Character Classes
Greedy Matches

3. Find & Replace Location: Content > Find and Replace
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Location: Content > Find and Replace
Administrators Only (User Level 10)
Searches a single site
Adjust scope to limit searchable content
Literal Text or Regular Expression

4. Find & Replace Find Simple search with results list. Preview Replace
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Find
Simple search with results list.
Preview Replace
Safe multi-step process
Perform ‘sample’ find/replace and display results list.
Select pages from results to perform the actual find/replace operation.
Publish selected results (optional).

5. History of Regular Expressions
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Regular Expression
A pattern that describes a certain amount of text.
The concept arose in the 1950s when the American mathematician Stephen Cole description of a regular language.
Now used in almost every major programming language.

6. Literal Character Search
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Literal Text Matches
Most characters match exactly themselves (beware of whitespace)
Case Sensitive
Great way to get a general idea of how many items will at least need to be captured if you need to generate a regular expression “find.”
Example of literal find

7. Special Characters Symbol characters that have special purpose:
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Symbol characters that have special purpose:
\ ^ $ . | ? * ( ) [ ] { }
To match as literal characters, you must escape them by adding a backslash “\” in front of said special character.

8. Special Characters: Period
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
The period character is the “wildcard” character
Will match any character except a newline (\n)

9. Special Characters: Quantifiers
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Symbol characters that define how many of the previous character(s) to match
? (0 or 1)
* (0 or more)
+ (1 or more)
Use curly brackets to indicate an exact number or range
{3} (Exactly 3)
{3,} (3 or more)
{3,5} (3, 4, or 5)
Only modifies the previous character (or group)

10. Special Characters: Parenthesis
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Capture Groups
Encapsulate a character sequence using parentheses: “(…)”
Add a quantifier to affect the whole group
Replace
In the “replace field,” refer to your groups using the dollar sign and then the group number: $#
Count the opening parenthesis characters, “(“, to determine the correct #

11. Special Characters: Square Brackets
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Character Sets
Characters encased inside square brackets define all possible matches for a single text character: [abc]
A quantifier place directly after the set will affect the whole character set
Placing a “-” hyphen between characters indicates a range
Placing a “^” caret as the first item in the set creates a negative pattern
Quantifier characters become literal matches: ? + * { }
Placing a “.” period becomes literal match

12. Shorthand Character Classes
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Certain characters can reference a range of characters when escaped by a backslash “\”
Examples:
“\d” matches all digit characters: [0-9]
“\w” matches all word characters: [A-Za-z0-9]
“\s” matches all whitespace characters (including line breaks)
Using the capital letter will inverse the match
“\S” matches all non-space characters: [^\s]
\d{3}-\d{4}

13. [\s\S]*? Greedy Matches
ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
When using quantifiers, a careless (or purposeful) pattern could match beyond an expected result
Applying an extra “?” question mark character after the initial quantifier, to make the pattern stop at the first successful match
[\s\S]*?

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