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How to search for a pattern in IntelliJ IDEA

I couldn't figure out how to search for a pattern in my project or module.

I wanted to find all the files having texts something like aaabbbccc or aaa123ccc. I see no results found when I tried as aaa*ccc by checking Regular Expressions.

What am I missing here?

Solution

  • You were close. You want:

    aaa.*ccc

    The * in regular expressions says match the previous character 0 or more times.

    So aaa*ccc matches aaccc and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaccc but not aaabccc.

    The . is "any character" (except new line) and will match aaaXXXccc.