Searching with the dot character

The dot character is used to match a single character in a character sequence. For example, say we had three constants defined somewhere in our module that defined threshold levels for some particular operation:

#define threshold_low      2400

#define threshold_high     4800

#define threshold_mid      3600

If we wanted to find the occurrence of all three of these thresholds in a single search we could use the following regular expression search string:

threshold_...

This would match any sequence in the active document where the word threshold is followed immediately by three characters. Our search result would look like:

#define threshold_low      2400

#define threshold_high     4800

#define threshold_mid      3600

In the next example we'll introduce the character classes to make our search a little more powerful.