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2.

Use Ctrl+F to open the Find And Replace dialog box.

3.

Check the Regular Expression check box and the Match Case check box.

4.

Enter the regular expression pattern

ABC[0-9]*

in the Search For text box.

5.

Click the Find All button, and inspect the matches that are highlighted.

Figure A-17 shows the matches in OpenOffice.org Writer. As you can see, all of the part numbers match the

pattern.

Figure A-17

Before working through a couple of the matches, briefly look at part of the regular expression pattern,

[0-9]*

. The asterisk applies to the character class

[0-9]

, which I call a

chunk.

Why does the first part number

ABC

match? When the regular expression engine is at the position imme-

diately before the

A

of

ABC

, it attempts to match the next character in the part number with an uppercase

A

.

Because the first character of the part number

ABC

is an uppercase

A

, there is a match. Next, an attempt is

made to match an uppercase

B

. That too matches, as does an attempt to match an uppercase

C

. At that

333

Appendix A: Simple Regular Expressions

bapp01.qxd:bapp01 10:47 333

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