How to use the regexp for digits with an interactive search?

Question

For example, I have the following content in the buffer:

To match the 4 numbers, I need the regular expression of \d{4}. I would like to do the same in Emacs, when I press C-s and type the regexp.

When I'm looking in the documentation of Emacs regexp, many various regexp, Emacs own regexp, applications in Emacs Lisp, and so on, it's intensively documented.

I just want to have interactive search, type the regexp \d{4} and find the match. How could I apply that? The documentation gave no directly answer on this.

Press C-M-s and type [0-9]{4}. As far as I know that is the emacs-way. — Tobias, Apr 03 '16 at 22:56

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 04 '16 at 00:25

8

As far as I can tell, there is no \d in Emacs regular expressions. So, @Tobias's comment is (mostly) correct, except that you need to escape the curly brackets. Either of the following will work:

`C-M-s` => [0-9]\{4\}
`C-M-s` => [[:digit:]]\{4\}

answered Apr 04 '16 at 00:25

Dan

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Such a pity! I did verify the search including the backslash. I do not know why I missed the backslash in the comment. Maybe, it was the late hour. Thanks for correcting me. – Tobias Apr 04 '16 at 06:07
Thanks for your answer, Dan and @Tobias but I'm wondering why Emacs don't have any application for 'regular' regexp's? – ReneFroger Apr 04 '16 at 15:21
2

I know that the visual-regexp-steriods package adds support for python and perl like regular expressions – Jules Apr 04 '16 at 16:04
@ReneFroger: don't know, sorry. That sounds like a separate question and possibly a feature request. – Dan Apr 04 '16 at 16:07
@JulesTamagnan thanks for your answer, great package by the way! – ReneFroger Apr 06 '16 at 19:29

How to use the regexp for digits with an interactive search?

1 Answers1