Finding and Replacing Text

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The Text editor supports both full string searching and incremental searching. You can search for text in a single source file or in multiple files. You can search for literal text strings or use regular expressions to find words or characters. You can also use tagged regular expressions for searching and replacing.

With the Find command, you can search the active window or all open documents for the following types of text strings:

  • Whole Word Match   Matches all occurrences of a text string not preceded or followed by an alphanumeric character or the underscore (_).

  • Case Match   Searches for text that matches the capitalization of the text string.

  • Regular Expressions   Uses special character sequences — regular expressions — to search for text. If you select the Regular Expression check box in the Find dialog box, you can build the search string using regular expressions from the drop-down list.

You can toggle these types of searches using toolbar buttons; you can also toggle whether you search the active file only or all open files, again with a toolbar button.

You can set bookmarks at every occurrence of the text string or expression. You can then use the BookmarkNext command to move to each bookmark in your file.

What do you want to know more about?

Text search methods

Find commands

Regular expressions

What do you want to do?

Find text in a single file

Find text in multiple files

Replace text

Find text using regular expressions