# Normal search

You can search text as in most programs using the Find/Replace dialog. You can open this dialog by selecting Search->Find (or pressing ), Search->Replace (or pressing ) or Search->Find in Files.

Each of these options will open the corresponding tab in the Find/Replace dialog. This dialog will always stay on top of the text, but you can still keep on editing the text if it's opened, and you can set it to be transparent (using the Transparency option) when its inactive (On lose focus) or at all times (Always). The slider controls the amount of transparency. Note that transparency is only available on Windows 2000 and later.

In the Find what field, type the text you want to find. This is automatically filled with the current selected text, or the word under the caret, or the last searched pattern, when the Find dialog is opened. The drop down list contains previous search items if a search was performed before. See also Search Mode.

The In selection checkbox will restrict search to the selection. It is disabled if there is no selection.

- Match whole word only will only result in a hit if the match consists of an entire word, not if it's partial (for example (but not limited to), whitespace separated).
- Match case enforces that hits have exactly the same case as the query. If this is disabled, the search is case insensitive.
- Wrap around will start at the top of the file when the end of the file is reached when searching, depending on the location of the cursor.

The search mode determines how the query will be handled:

- In Normal, the text will be searched literally.
- In Extended, special character sequences will be interpreted as special characters such as newline characters. In this case, you can choose from:
  - \\ - Backslash character;
  - \t – TAB character;
  - \r – CR character;
  - \n – LF character;
  - \0 – NULL character;
  - \x## - Hexadecimal value (between 00 and FF);
  - \u#### - Extended hexadecimal value (between 0000 and FFFF, meant for Unicode characters);
  - \d### - Decimal value (between 000 and 255);
  - \o### - Octal value (between 000 and 377);
  - \b######## - Binary value (between 00000000 and 11111111).
- In Regular Expression, the query will be handled like a regular expression. Notepad++ uses PCRE regular expression syntax, which is an established standard. Full documentation is to be found here Some examples here:Regular Expressions Tutorials

In the above description, # stands for any digit. Depending on the context, "digit" may have a different meaning - for instance, in binary, a digit is 0 or 1 only.

The search direction determines to what relative direction of the cursor will be searched. Up means text before the cursor will be searched, Down means text beyond the cursor will be searched.

The normal behaviour is to select the matched text when performing a Find. However, in regular expression mode, the matched text may well be empty, like on matching "^". When this happens, a tooltip points the position of the empty string being matched.

To find the (next) hit, press Find Next (or Enter). Count will count the amount of hits the search will result in. Find all in all opened documents will search all opened documents and displays a list of results for each file, see also Searching in Files. Find all in current documents behaves in a very similar way.

Close simple closes the search dialog (close button and ESC do the same).

## Locating characters

One possible use of the search facility may be to locate characters of a certain kind in a document, like accented letters that you need to convert to the corresponding HTML entity. This is done using the Search -> Find characters in range... dialog. This dialog enables you to Find the next or previous character in either the ASCII (0..127) range, non ASCII (128..255) range, or a custom range you specify - values above 255 are not properly taken into account. Search will Wrap around if you request so.