are searching for strings with varying amounts of spaces / data in between, possible?

[Frederick Solebo]

Hi guys, my first time posting here… Let’s say a paragraph reads as follows (in quotes):

“The sky is blue.
The sky is very blue.
A red sky can even possibly turn 336699 blue today.”

Using notepad++, is it possible for me to do some type of search that will find me all instances of the word “sky” following by any number of characters (numbers and/or letters), followed by the word “blue”? There are 3 total instances of this situation in the paragraph above, but notice that the data in between “sky” and “blue” on each line / instance is not consistent; it could be varying lengths of data, it could be numbers, it could be letters, different amounts of spaces, etc. I realize that doing a find for “sky” asterick “blue” won’t do the job.

Is what I’m asking possible? Also, what’s the name for this type of search?

Thanks,
Fred

[Scott Sumner]

@Frederick-Solebo

Yes, very possible with the use of Regular expression search as follows:

Find what zone: (?-is)sky.+blue
Search mode: Regular expression

You should be able to deduce what the .+ does.
The (?-is) at the beginning indicates 2 things:

• case of sky and blue must match exactly (the -i part)
• the . will NOT match end-of-line characters (the s part, but note that the - from earlier effectively makes this -s)

Probably this is confusing, so a better explanation is that the i stands for (case) insensitive, so -i means NOT case insensitive, or rather case sensitive (meaning case must be exact for a match to occur)

A better explanation for the s part: (?s) means that any . characters occurring will match one character of any type (including end-of-line characters). (?-s) means that any . characters occurring will match one character of any type EXCEPT it won’t match the end of line characters (carriage return, line feed).