2 <head><title>Search</title>
3 <style type="text/css">
13 <p><strong>Search</strong></p>
14 <p>The search box is displayed by pressing Control and F or
15 selecting "Find..." from the "Search" menu.</p>
16 <img src="search.gif" width="339" height="110">
17 <p>"Find next" will find the next occurence of the specified and adjust
18 the alignment window view to show it, and "Find all" highlights all
19 matches for a pattern. The "New Feature" is a quick way to highlight
20 and group residues matching the specified search pattern throughout the alignment.
22 <li>The search uses regular expressions. (understands a mixture of posix and
23 perl style regex - see below for a summary)</li>
24 <li>Gaps are ignored when matching the query to the sequences in the alignment.</li>
25 <li>The search is applied to both sequences and their IDs.</li>
26 <li>If a region is selected, then search will <strong>only</strong> be performed
28 <li>To quickly clear the current selection, press the "Escape" key.</li>
29 <li>Tick the "Match Case" box to perform a case sensitive search.</li>
31 <p><strong>Creating Features from Search Results</strong></p>
33 If "New Feature" is selected, the feature can be given a name from
34 a popup input box. Use the "Feature Settings" under the "View"
35 menu to change the visibility and colour of the new sequence feature.</p>
36 <p><strong>A quick Regular Expression Guide</strong></p>
37 <p>A regular expression is not just a simple text query - although it
38 can be used like one, the query is not parsed literally, but
39 interpreted like a series of instructions defining the features of the
40 match. For example, a simple query like "ACDED" would
41 match all occurences of that string, but "ACD+ED" matches
42 both 'ACDDED' and 'ACDDDDDDDDED'. More usefully, the query
43 "[ILGVMA]{;5,}" would find stretches of small,
44 hydrophobic amino acids of at least five residues in length.
47 below describes some of the regular expression syntax:<br></p>
48 <table width="100%" border="1">
50 <td width="24%">Regular Expression Element</td>
51 <td width="76%">Effect</td>
54 <td width="24%">.</td>
55 <td width="76%">Matches any single character</td>
59 <td>Matches any one of the characters in the brackets</td>
63 <td>Matches at the start of an ID or sequence</td>
67 <td>Matches at the end of an ID or sequence</td>
71 <td>Matches if the preceding element matches zero or more times</td>
75 <td>Matches if the preceding element matched once or not at all</td>
79 <td>Matches if the preceding element matched at least once</td>
83 <td>Matches if the preceding element matches a specified number of
89 <td> Matches of the preceding element matched at least the
90 specified number of times</td>
94 <td>Matches if the preceding element matches min or at most max