HV SID Collection Search - Help

The search uses regular expressions. If you don't know what that is and don't want to know - simply enter some text and the search will match those entries whose text contains the text you typed. The search is by default case-insensitive, meaning that lowercase and uppercase characters are equal. When a field is left empty is means that all entries will match. So, if you want to look at the whole database, leave all fields empty and start the search.

Regular expressions

Regular expressions are used in many programs; sed, grep, and perl to name a few. I will not go into details of the syntax and everything, just name a few control characters that may be useful here. Check the end of this page for a few examples.

Special characters

\	Quote the next metacharacter
^	Match the beginning of the line
.	Match any character (except newline)
$	Match the end of the line
\|	Alternation
()	Grouping
[]	Character class

Quantity matching

*	Match 0 or more times
+	Match 1 or more times
?	Match 1 or 0 times
{n}	Match exactly n times
{n,}	Match at least n times
{n,m}	Match at least n but not more than m times

Type matching

\w	Match a "word" character (alphanumeric plus "_")
\W	Match a non-word character
\s	Match a whitespace character
\S	Match a non-whitespace character
\d	Match a digit character
\D	Match a non-digit character

Examples

To get all Hubbard tunes that begin with the character a, type ^a in the title field and hubbard in the author field.
To get all tunes with at least 3 consecutive digits in the title, type \d{3} in the title field.
To get all tunes that has either the word music or the word muzak in the title, type music|muzak in the title field.
To get all Galway tunes from 1987, type galway in the author field and 1987 in the copyright field.

Adam Lorentzon <adam.lorentzon@home.se>