Regular Expressions

The parts search form allows the use of regular expressions in the text fields. A regular expression is a way of specifying more precisely what you are looking for. The expressions used by this search engine are not case sensitive, so a capital X is the same as a lower case x.

A regular expression is the text you want to find, possibly mixed with special characters/strings. Some of the more useful special characters are:

• A period represents any character, and is considered a wild card.
• A asterisk (star) stands for a sequence of the character immediately preceding the asterix, of any length. So A* will match a single A, or AAAAAAAAA. A period followed by an asterix matchs a sequence of any characters.
• A caret (^) indicates that what follows it should be the first characters in what you want to find. So ^26 means any string which begins with 26, of any length. A caret used in this way must be the first character you type.
• A dollar sign indicates that the text/expression which precedes it must be at the very end of the item for which you are searching. So caliper$ will match brake caliper but not brake caliper pin.

So, combining those special characters, you can search for ^caliper.*kit$, and that will find caliper seal kit, but not brake caliper seal kit nor caliper seal kits.

In addition, one may group expressions with parenthesis and use logical OR and AND operations, with the vertical bar (|) and ampersand (&) characters, respectively.