PREV UP NEXT GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual

Chapter 30: Searching and Matching

GNU Emacs provides two ways to search through a buffer for specified text: exact string searches and regular expression searches. After a regular expression search, you can examine the match data to determine which text matched the whole regular expression or various portions of it.

  • String Search Search for an exact match.
  • Regular Expressions Describing classes of strings.
  • Regexp Search Searching for a match for a regexp.
  • POSIX Regexps Searching POSIX-style for the longest match.
  • Search and Replace Internals of query-replace.
  • Match Data Finding out which part of the text matched various parts of a regexp, after regexp search.
  • Searching and Case Case-independent or case-significant searching.
  • Standard Regexps Useful regexps for finding sentences, pages,...

    • The skip-chars... functions also perform a kind of searching. See Skipping Characters.