Regular Expressions

A regular expression is a formula composed of characters that have special meanings (called operators). Other characters are plain letters and numbers that are searched for. The search engine browses the target text one character at a time and stops as soon as it finds a sequence of characters that matches the regular expression.

At various places in WaveLab Pro, you can use regular expressions to build complex text matching operations into your conversion and renaming processes. A regular expression is a set of text symbols that describe a method to find a specific text string within a large body of text, and then apply a specific operation to this text string. Regular expressions are available to perform powerful string search/replace operations, for example, in batch renaming or batch processing.

Throughout WaveLab Pro, wherever you see an asterisk, there is a field where you can create your own regular expressions. A menu containing shortcuts to build up the basic syntax of an expression is also available.

Figure: Regular expressions icon