Pattern specification (normal version)

In submitting a PATTERN to be searched, upper and lower-case letters are not equivalent
(however, you can optionally choose to make them equivalent).
Be careful in the use of special characters as listed below.

special character	what it does
period `.`	A wildcard that matches any single character.
carat `^`	Requires the pattern to be at the beginning of the entry.
brackets `[ ]`	Enclose a collection of characters, any one of which will cause the bracketed collection to be matched. Use `[a-z]` for any small alphabetic character, use `[A-Z]` for any Capital letter, use `[A-Za-z]` for any alphabetic character, use `[0-9]` for any digit.
asterisk `*`	Allows 0 or more repeats of the previous character match. So, use `x` for 0 or more x's, use `xx` for 1 or more x's, and use `[0-9][0-9]*` for 1 or more digits.

Examples

pattern	matches with	does not match
`EH*RENP`	EHRENPREIS, ERENPREIS you should try this for pre-1830 records
`1807.*Abraham`	records from the year 1807 that contain Abraham
`Hirsch`	Hirschfeld Hirschberg	Hirszberg
`Hir[sz]b`	Hirsberg Hirzberg	Hirschberg Hirzfeld
`Hir[sz].berg`	Hirshberg	Hirzberg Hirschberg
`Hir[sz].*berg`	Hirshberg Hirzberg Hirschberg Hirsch and iceberg
`Hir[sz][a-z]*berg`	Hirshberg Hirzberg Hirschberg	Hirsch and iceberg
`Elk.*Beil`	any line containing a name that starts with `Elk` and any later word contains `Beil` such as Elkan Rachel Beile
`^1806.*May`	any line that starts with `1806` and any later word contains `May`

Pattern specification (powerful version)

In addition to the characters that are normally treated as being special by the pattern matching program,
when using the more powerful version, the following additional characters are also special.

special character	what it does
parentheses `( )`	Enclose a pattern
question `?`	Allows 0 or 1 matches of the previous pattern
plus `+`	Allows 1 or more repeats of the previous pattern
vertical bar `\|`	Allows a choice of matching previous or next pattern

Examples

pattern	matches with
`JONAS\|JOHANNES`	records containing either JONAS or JOHANNES you should try this for pre-1830 records

Dan Hirschberg
Computer Science Department
University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3425

dan at ics.uci.edu
Last modified: Jan 12, 2009