Special characters in regexes and how to escape them

Regex – Regular Expression

Cradle provides support for regular expressions, regular expressions are a means to find variable text in places such as:

Queries
Find dialogs
Category recognition strings
Category value validations

For instance, regular expressions (regexes) can be used in queries to find all items in which any frame, or a specific frame, or any of a list of frames, contains text matching the regular expression that you are searching for. For example, if you wanted to find all items containing sequences of capital letters followed by numbers, then the regular expression would be:

[A-Z]+[0-9]+

Special Characters

Some characters have special meanings within regexes these characters are:

Char	Description	Meaning
\	Backslash	Used to escape a special character
^	Caret	Beginning of a string
$	Dollar sign	End of a string
.	Period or dot	Matches any single character
\|	Vertical bar or pipe symbol	Matches previous OR next character/group
?	Question mark	Match zero or one of the previous
*	Asterisk or star	Match zero, one or more of the previous
+	Plus sign	Match one or more of the previous
( )	Opening and closing parenthesis	Group characters
[ ]	Opening and closing square bracket	Matches a range of characters
{ }	Opening and closing curly brace	Matches a specified number of occurrences of the previous

Examples

Finished\? matches “Finished?”
^http matches strings that begin with http
[^0-9] matches any character not 0-9
ing$ matches “exciting” but not “ingenious”
gr.y matches “gray“, “grey”
Red|Yellow matches “Red” or “Yellow”
colou?r matches colour and color
Ah? matches “Al” or “Ah”
Ah* matches “Ahhhhh” or “A”
Ah+ matches “Ah” or “Ahhh” but not “A”
[cbf]ar matches “car“, “bar“, or “far”
[a-zA-Z] matches ascii letters a-z (uppercase and lower case)

Using Special Characters as Literal Characters

If you want to use any of these as literal characters you can escape special characters with \ to give them their literal character meaning.

Example

If you want to match 1+2=3, you need to use a backslash (\) to escape the + as this character has a special meaning (Match one or more of the previous).
To match the 1+2=3 as one string you would need to use the regex 1\+2=3

For further information on using regexes in Cradle see our online help.