Tutorial: Searching Using Regular Expressions

Trying to get artist, venue and event names exactly correct when searching can be difficult. For instance, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival might be listed as The 22nd Annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Telluride Bluegrass Festival or simply Telluride Festival. To improve the chances that you will find what you are looking for, Musi-Cal supports searching using a class of patterns called regular expressions. Most of the time you can treat regular expressions as simple keyword searching, but they are much more powerful than that. This document describes regular expressions briefly and gives a few Musi-Cal related examples. For a more detailed treatise, track down some Emacs or Perl documentation.

When To Use Regular Expressions

Regular expression searching is currently supported for the artist, venue and event fields only. Other text fields (city, state and date) only support literal matches.

Some Simple Examples

Here are a few examples to get your feet wet. Note that all searches are case-insensitive. Any special characters used are described later.

taylor|fleck - matches any string containing either taylor or fleck.
bluegrass.*festival - matches any string containing bluegrass followed by festival, with zero or more other characters separating them.
bluegrass.+festival - matches any string containing bluegrass followed by festival, with one or more other characters separating them.
(wolf|corner)stone - matches any string containing wolf or corner followed by stone.

Special Characters

'.' is a regular expression that matches any character.
'*' causes the previous regular expression to match zero or more times.
'+' causes the previous regular expression to match one or more times.
'|' matches the previous or following regular expressions (alternation operator).
'(' and ')' provide grouping of regular expressions (grouping operators). The regular expression wolf|cornerstone (wolf or cornerstone) is decidedly different than (wolf|corner)stone (wolf or corner followed by stone). In this context the grouping operators restrict the scope of the alternation operator.

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