ADVANCE FIND & REPLACE WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

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

2. Agenda • 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 • 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 • 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.”

7. Special Characters • 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]

13. 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]*?

14. THANK YOU! PLEASE SHARE YOUR FEEDBACK: WWW.SLIDO.COM#OUTC19