Extended Search mode in Find dialog

Michael Carroll

Two related questions:

The Find dialog has a radio button for Extended search and gives examples I recognize like \t for Tab. But I don’t find any documentation on which characters Notepad++ supports. Is there a list somewhere?
I have a text file that Notepad++ displays in columns in normal mode. If I turn on View/Show symbol/All, I get something like an arrow -> as the column separator. I want to change this to a comma but can’t figure out how. (\t is not found. I expected it to be a tab character but it isn’t.

Thanks for any help.

Courtney Fay

I’m looking for this too. Where is the standard help file or faq’s on find and replace functions for extended searching and such?

Jonathan Weers

For whatever reason, it seems to have left the ? menu. F1 brings up About.

file:///C:/Program%20Files%20%28x86%29/Notepad++/user.manual/documentation/notepad-user-manual/searching/normal-search.html

(in browser) is an example of where I could find it before updating recently (mine was around v6.3.x at the time), using Windows 7. I can still find it there and you may have it available as well. In case you don’t, here’s the list:

\\ - Backslash character;
\t – TAB character;
\r – CR character;
\n – LF character;
\0 – NULL character;
\x## - Hexadecimal value (between 00 and FF);
\u#### - Extended hexadecimal value (between 0000 and FFFF, meant for Unicode characters);
\d### - Decimal value (between 000 and 255);
\o### - Octal value (between 000 and 377);
\b######## - Binary value (between 00000000 and 11111111).

However, I have a problem with searching things like “w\0o\0r\0d”. It seems to combine the characters in a weird way, and I’m not sure why. Same happens with \x00 instead of \0. \x00o might find \x00n instead, or \0\0. I don’t know if I’m doing something weird, but it seems like this should work fine.