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If you want to create filters, perform searches or set up goals in Angelfish Software, you need an understanding of regular expressions. This article is a basic introduction.
Regular expressions (also known as regex) are used to find a specific pattern. For example, you can find all pages within a subdirectory, or all keywords more than ten characters long.
Regular expressions provide a powerful and flexible way to describe what the pattern should look like, using a combination of special and alphanumeric characters. Here is a list of commonly-used RegEx characters in Angelfish:
-
^ Caret: Match from the beginning of the field -
$ Dollar: Match to the end of the field -
. Period: Match any single character -
| Pipe: OR -
* Asterisk: Match zero or more of the previous item -
? Question Mark: Match zero or one of the previous item
(i.e. makes the item optional) -
[] Brackets: Match one item in this list -
() Parentheses: Match contents of parenthesis as item -
+ Plus Sign: Match one or more of the previous item -
\ Backslash: Escape symbol for any of the above characters
Anchors
Anchors match a specified pattern from the beginning or at the end of a field. The caret and dollar symbols are anchors.
The caret symbol "^" matches a pattern from the beginning. For example:
^car will match "car", "carpet" and "cartoon".
It won't match "scar", "red carpet" or "new cars"
The dollar symbol "$" matches a pattern to the end of the field. For example:
car$ will match "car", "scar" and "red car".
It won't match "cars", "carpet" or "cartoon"
You can also combine a caret and dollar in a single pattern:
^car$ will only match "car", not "cars" or "scar"
^$ will match only empty strings
Ranges
Regex can also be used to match ranges or combinations of characters.
Brackets "[]" allow you to specify individual characters that appear in the string. Brackets look at each individual character, not whole words.
[agf] will match "a", "g" or "f".
[fish] will match "f" "i" "s" or "h"
You can include a long list of characters in brackets, but it's usually easier to match a range of characters. For example:
[a-z] will match any lowercase letter
[0-9] will match any number
[a-z0-9] will match any letter or number.
[a-dx-z] will match a, b, c, d, x, y, or z.
Parentheses "()" allow you to match a specific string of characters, like (cat) or (dog). To match a multiple strings, enclose them in parentheses and use a pipe "|" between each string. For example:
To match "cat" or "dog", type (cat)|(dog) OR (cat|dog)
The period "." will match any single character. For example:
car.s will match "carrs", "car?s", "car5s", etc.
Repeating Patterns
With Regex, you can specify the number of times a pattern should occur.
A question mark "?" after a character will match zero or one occurrence of the character. For example:
crawl? matches "crawl" or "craw".
(www\.)?website\.com matches "www.website.com" or "website.com"
A plus sign "+" matches one or more occurrences. For example:
a+ will match "a", "aa", "aaaaaaaaaa", etc.
/+ will match "/", "//", "////////", etc.
.+ is a wildcard that will only match if the field is not empty
An asterisk "*" will match any number of occurrences (including zero). For example:
a* will match all of the above.
.* is a wildcard that will match an empty or non-empty field.
Escaping Special Characters
Occasionally you'll want to match a character that is also a regex special character. For example:
.com will match "website.com" and will also match "marcom.net"
The backslash "\" allows you to escape the value of a regex special character. Using the above example, \.com would match "website.com" and ignore "marcom.net".
If you want to match a series of special characters in a row, you need to escape each one individually.
To match "$?", you would type \$\?
And since a backslash itself is a special character, you would need to type two backslashes into regex in order to match a single literal backslash.
If you're unsure whether a character is a special character or not, you can escape it without any negative consequences.
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