Filtering with Regular Expressions

Selecting 'Custom' as the filter value enables regular expression based filtering. A regular expression is a pattern that specifies the character text to search for. This pattern can contain any combination of the four wildcards defined in the table below.

Wildcard Meaning
% Any string of zero or more characters.
_ Any single character.
[ ] Any single character within the specified range (e.g, [a-f]) or set (e.g., [abcdef]).
[^] Any single character not within the specified range (e.g., [^a - f]) or set (e.g, [^abcdef]).

Enclose the wildcard(s) and the character string in single quotation marks, for example:

  • 'Mc%' searches for all strings that begin with the letters Mc (McBadden).
  • '%inger' searches for all strings that end with the letters inger (Ringer, Stringer).
  • '%en%' searches for all strings that contain the letters en anywhere in the string (Bennet, Green, McBadden).
  • '_heryl' searches for all six-letter names ending with the letters heryl (Cheryl, Sheryl).
  • '[CK]ars[eo]n' searches for Carsen, Karsen, Carson, and Karson (Carson).
  • '[M-Z]inger' searches for all names ending with the letters inger that begin with any single letter from M through Z (Ringer).
  • 'M[^c]%' searches for all names beginning with the letter M that do not have the letter c as the second letter (MacFeather).