Find any set of characters, Characters with special meaning, Name – Nisus Writer Express User Manual

Page 215: Appearance, Meaning

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Polishing & Managing Documents

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is the expression that you want to find (you can replace this with any other
expression you want to find)

+

“one or more times” character

Find any set of characters

Suppose you want to search your document for all punctuation marks.

Enter [,.;?!]+ in the Find box.

[ and ]

the brackets stand for a user-defined wild card, that is whatever appears within
them. In this case Nisus Writer Express interprets the punctuation marks literally.

+

is equivalent to +is equivalent to

(1+ on the Repeat menu).

Characters with Special Meaning

The characters listed here have special meaning in PowerFind Pro expressions. To use one of these
characters literally in an expression, precede it with a backslash “\”. This includes the backslash
itself (so if you want to find a backslash, you need to have “\\” in the Find box.)

Table 20

Characters with special meaning in PowerFind Pro

As you work with PowerFind Pro, keep in mind that the meanings of most special characters depend
on their context.

Modifier Characters

Use the modifier characters backslash and colon to change how Nisus Writer Express interprets
what follows them.

\

the backslash

Name

backslash

caret

dollar sign

asterisk

plus

question mark

period

brackets

vertical line

1

backslash

Appearance

\

^

$

*

+

?

.

[ and ]

|

Meaning

Changes character meaning

Represents the beginning of

paragraph position
Matches the end of the

paragraph position
Expression that precedes

occurs zero or more times
Expression that precedes

occurs one or more times
Expression that precedes

occurs zero or once
Any character not including

the Return
For enclosing user-defined

wild cards
For finding the character

either before or after this

character “Or”. By itself it

finds anything, but selects

nothing.

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