Need help with search feature...

Yangci Ou

Hello everybody.

This is my first time posting something lol.

Anyways, I was wondering if there’s like another way to search for words.

So basically I play a game that that you have to guess the word while they build something, and I have a big list of all the words. From time to time it gives out hints like ____e. Is there any way I can use the seach feature to find the words in my list using underscores for blanks?

For example, the word is whale.

The hint is ____e. I would enter 4 underscores and e and whale should show up or atleast all the words that is 5 letters and end with e. Anyone have any clue of how to do this ?

Scott Sumner

@Yangci-Ou

Sure…welcome to the Community. :-)

That’s a pretty easy one. You can use the Find All in Current Document feature:

Invoke the Find feature (press Ctrl+f)
Find what zone: \b....e\b
Set Match case to your pleasure
Search mode: Regular expression
Action: Press Find All in Current Document button

Each . in the Find what zone represents a character position where you don’t care about what value it takes on (your “underscores”). The \b at the start and end just means to encase what comes between as a word, thus the example above would match “whale” but not the whale part of “whales” or “whaleboat”.

This is rather basic “regular expression” stuff so I encourage you to go off and do some reading about what that is and how to use it for your needs in the future.