Substring search using voidtools Everything

March 30, 2022 9:33 PM

I use Everything for local system searches and sometimes do a regex but it's always laborious. I'm currently searching a group of files which all look something like this:

Brachyglottis laxifolia n214_03 slope dbot20200307_090740.jpg

Acaena saccatipula n214 LeeSayBarb dbot20201101_664

chionochloa rigida mono n1 ibot20190302_101814.jpg

Geranium traversii n214_410 dbot20191225_501

I want all the files where YEARMO is 2***03* ¹ (as per the bolding above)
The format is always several strings and then a string in this format:

20220331
string can be immediately preceded by either characters or an empty space but there is always a YEAR MOnth DAte string like 20191225, and the the rest of the date sequence, and the filename either terminates there or runs on with any character.

I have tried a lot of variations all with no luck.

1 - So this is years from 2000 to 2022

posted by unearthed to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I haven't used that tool, but it sounds like you're looking for a regex that matches 2\d{3}03 ?
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:37 PM on March 30, 2022

I guess you might go further and use \D2\d{3}03\d{2}_ if the other one matches too much.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:43 PM on March 30, 2022

*bot2???03??_*

Edit: could be overly specific, but will work for the examples provided. Try *2???03* for a broader result.
posted by jmfitch at 4:46 AM on March 31, 2022

Everything lets you search for more than one word at a time like this:

nopath:red|nopath:blue|nopath:orange

So this might work if you include all the years:
nopath:200003|nopath:200103|nopath:200203

You can set bookmarks once you have the string that works, so I'd make one for each month and bookmark them. If these solutions don't work, can you tell us how they fail, like if they show too much or not enough and which ones are extra or missing?
posted by soelo at 6:26 AM on March 31, 2022

I got to something like what Wobbuffet suggested: 2\d{3}03\d{2}
So that's the number 2, then three digits, then the number 0, the number 3, and then two more digits.

Which by the way I really like regex101.com's testing tool linked above, excellent for troubleshooting regexes.
posted by gregr at 6:32 AM on March 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you everyone, I'll be working thru these tomorrow, but so so far jmfitch's suggestion is the simplest tool for getting this job done, and I can easily edit it for another month.
posted by unearthed at 2:13 PM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]