Searching and Matching

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34 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.

String Search: Search for an exact match.
Searching and Case: Case-independent or case-significant searching.
Regular Expressions: Describing classes of strings.
Regexp Search: Searching for a match for a regexp.
POSIX Regexps: Searching POSIX-style for the longest match.
Match Data: Finding out which part of the text matched, after a string or regexp search.
Search and Replace: Commands that loop, searching and replacing.
Standard Regexps: Useful regexps for finding sentences, pages,...

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