Tutorial: Search Tool
The Search tool provides simple search and replace operations on the current editor or documentation page. Key bindings for operations on this tool are given in the Search and Replace group in the Edit menu.
Searches may span the whole file or be constrained to the current selection, can be case sensitive or insensitive, and may optionally be constrained to matching only whole words.
By default, searching is incremental while you type your search string. To disable this, uncheck Incremental in the Options menu.
Replacing
When the tool is displayed with Replace, or when the Show Replace item in the Options menu is activated, Wing will show an area for entering a replace string and add Replace and Replace All buttons to the Search tool:
Try replacing example1.py with search string PrintAs and replace string OutputAs.
Select the first result match and then Replace repeatedly. One search match will be replaced at a time. Search will occur again after each replace automatically unless you turn off the Find After Replace option. Changes can be undone in the editor, one at a time. Do this now to avoid saving this replace operation.
Next, try Replace All instead. Wing will simply replace all occurrences in the file at the same time. When this is done, a single undo in the editor will cancel the entire replace operation.
Wildcard Searching
By default, Wing searches for straight text matches on the strings you type. In Wing Pro and Wing Personal, wildcard and regular expression searching are also available in the Search tool's Options menu.
Wildcard searching allows you to specify a search string that contains * to match anything, ? to match a single character, or ranges of characters specified within [ and ] to match any of the specified characters. This is the same syntax supported by the Python glob module and is described in more detail in Wildcard Search Syntax.
Try a wildcard search now by selecting Wild Card from the Options menu while example1.py is your current editor. Set the search string to PrintAs*(. This should display all occurrences of the string PrintAs, followed by zero or more characters, followed by (:
Also try searching on PrintAs*[A-Z]( with the Case Sensitive search option turned on. This matches all strings starting with PrintAs followed by zero or more characters, followed by any capital letter from A to Z, followed by (.
Finally, try PrintAsT???, which will match any string starting with PrintAsT followed by any three characters.
Regular Expression Search
Regular expressions are most useful for complex search tasks, such as finding all calls to a particular function that occur as part of an assignment statement.
For example, open\(newscache( )?,.*\) matches only calls to the function open where the first argument is named newscache and there are at least two parameters. If you try this with example1.py after selecting Regex search from the Options menu then you should get exactly one search match:
In this mode, the replace string can reference regex match groups with , , etc, as in the Python re.sub() call.
The details of regular expression syntax and usage see Regular Expression Syntax in the Python manual.
See also Search Tool for more information.
