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.

The ‘skip-chars…’ functions also perform a kind of searching. See Skipping Characters. To search for changes in character properties, see Text Property Search Functions.

• Searching for Strings
• Searching and Case
• Regular Expressions
• Regular Expression Searching
• Longest-match searching for regular expression matches
• The Match Data
• Search and Replace
• Standard Regular Expressions Used in Editing
• Emacs versus POSIX Regular Expressions