Basic question: What wildcard characters can be used in find & replace, and what do the characters represent?

Rick Dickson

Apologies for the newbie question: What are the various wildcard characters that can be used in find & replace, and what do they represent?

For example, if I want to replace a comma with a space in all instances where the comma is in between 2 numbers, how do I do that?

Thank you for your time and guidance!

Matyáš Krupička

Hi,
there are none :)

If you want to perform this kind of replacement, you will need to learn regular expressions (a.k.a. regexp).

There are dozens of tutorial on the net, e.g. here:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/

I should warn you though, that regexp are like women: powerful, mysterious and unforgiving :)
And they usually don’t behave the way you expect.
But don’t be discouraged. It is a great tool, if used properly. In my work, where I deal a lot with a plaintext processing, I would be lost without them

Anyway, answer to your particular question about space between two numbers is
with regexp search mode:
Replace
(\d),(\d)
with
\1 \2