Search and Quick filter string syntax
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Wildmats (UE interpretation) Wildmat compares the text against the pattern. The pattern is interpreted according to rules similar to wildcards, and not as a full regular expression (so it runs much faster). The pattern is interpreted as follows: \x - If x is a boolean wildmat special character, i.e. one of ? * { } " ( ) ^ & | \ turns off the special meaning of x and matches it directly otherwise \ is not interpreted as a special character. It is not special inside curly brackets. ? - Matches any single character. * - Matches any sequence of zero or more characters. {x...y} - Matches any single character specified by the set x...y. A minus sign may be used to indicate a range of characters. That is, {0-5abc} is a shorthand for {012345abc}. More than one range may appear inside a character set; {0-9a-zA-Z._} matches almost all of the legal characters for a host name. The close curly bracket, }, may be used if it is the first character in the set. The minus sign, -, may be used if it is either the first or last character in the set. {^x...y} - This matches any character not in the set x...y, which is interpreted as described above. For example, {^}-} matches any character other than a close curly bracket or minus sign. " - Matches one or more non-alpha/non-numeric characters or beginning/end of the string. Given the above since wildmat substring oriented patterns may result in too many matches (e.g. when you match short words which may happen inside other words) there is a simple way to match whole words: "bach" phrases: "usenet explorer" or words: "bach"*"air" note that the double quote character can also limit the word from one side only: "usenet exp senet explorer" Boolean wildmats (UE wildmat extention - not for XPAT groups since it is not recoginzed by news servers) Whole wildmats can be combined with boolean operations: (from the highest to lowest precedence) ^ - NOT & - AND | - OR For example: "bach"&"air" Also they can be enclosed in nested parentheses e.g. subject (mozart|"bach")&^"cpe" - will show all headers which contain "mozart" or "bach" but don't contain "cpe" To turn off the special meaning like in wildmats put the backslash character before the control characters. When the left parenthesis is not the leftmost character and is not precedeed by ^ & | the backslash character before it may be omitted, the same true for right parentheses without matching left parentheses.