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.