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.