Although this capability by
itself has little use beyond what you can also achieve with standard Find and Replace operations, it??™s important
to remember this functionality as you begin to build your patterns.
When entering text in the Search field of the Find and Replace dialog box, do not include any
extra spaces after your search string. Dreamweaver interprets the spaces as part of your search
string, and the search only finds your text when it is followed by a space.
Wildcard characters
Initially, it??™s helpful to be able to use what are traditionally known as wildcards??”characters that match certain
different types of characters. The wildcards in regular expressions represent single characters and are
described in Table 8-3. In other words, no single regular expression represents all the characters, as the
asterisk does when used in PC file searches (such as *.*). However, such a condition can be represented
with a slightly more complex regular expression (described later in this section).
CAUTION CAUTION
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Working with Text 8
TABLE 8-3
Regular Expression Wildcard Characters
Character Matches Example
. Any single character, including letters, numbers, w.c matches wacky and How could you? but
spaces, punctuation, control characters (like not watch.
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