2006-09-24

How Do I Search for Wildcard Characters? #@.*?~[]'

How Do I Do a Find and Replace for Wildcard Characters? #@.*?~[]'

I've seen this question come up a couple of times on the augi and autodesk forums, so...

Most of us know at least a little bit about using wildcard characters to find something within a range. This works in most programs, handiest in databases, but, very useful in AutoCAD as well.

BUT! What do you do when you want to find one of those 'special' characters?

Well, you just precede the character with an apostrophe... like '*

see also autodesk knowledgebase entry ID: TS1051672

Edit: Due to the site redesign, most URL's pointing to Autodesk's website are broken. Here's an updated link.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've tried to find the ? characters in a drwaing containing text with AutoCAD 2007 italian version but it found "nothing".
Do you know if there is a difference between localized versions of AutoCAD?
Thanks.

Mistress of the Dorkness said...

sorry, I've had a look around, but, I can't find anything dealing with this (at least in English, which is the only way I could reckognize it)... my only suggestion would be to search the autodesk italia website -
http://www.autodesk.it/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=457036&id=6506679

good luck!

Anonymous said...

We have ? come up in place of our degree sybol in all R14 dwgs and older. I highlight and copy the box in the text where the ? appears and paste it in the find portion of the dialogue. I then put %%d in the replace. It works great.

Unknown said...

I tried this solution in AutoCAD 2008. As written, the ' symbol did not work with finding the # symbol. However, the grave symbol ` found right above the tab key did successfully allow a search to be executed.

`# Worked
'# Did not work.

Mistress of the Dorkness said...

Dustin,

Whoa, that's an odd one. Thanks a lot for the tip! :-D