Find Text

The Find Text dialog

Summary

The Find Text dialog provides controls to quickly find specific or partial text in accordance with defined search options. In terms of scope, the dialog can be used to search for text on the active schematic document, across all source schematics in the active project, or across all open schematics regardless of the project. You also can constrain the search to project physical documents only, which is ideal when needing to search for a physical designator across the Compiled Document tab(s) of one or more schematic documents.

Access

From the schematic editor or schematic library editor, click Edit » Find Text from the main menus or use the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut.

Options/Controls

Text to find

• Text To Find – use this field to enter the text string for which you want to search. Either enter the full word or search for a partial string. The latter requires the Whole Words Only option to be disabled. The string can contain the wildcard characters ? (single character) and * (any group of characters).
  Wildcards are always case insensitive.
  Each string searched will be added to the field's drop-down list for quick retrieval.

Scope

• Sheet Scope – use this field to determine the scope of the text search in terms of the schematic documents involved. Choose from the following options:
  • Current Document – search the active document only.
  • Project Documents – search across all schematic documents in the active project.
  • Open Documents – search across all open schematic documents, regardless of the project to which they belong.
  • Project Physical Documents – search across the Compiled Document tabbed views of the active project's source schematic documents.
  To search for text across Project Physical Documents requires that active project is compiled first. If this is not done, the search will only be across the logical sheets (Editor tabbed view of the document).
• Selection – use this field to further constrain the scope of the search based on the current selection status of objects. Choose from the following options:
  • Selected Objects – limit the search to only those objects that are currently selected.
  • DeSelected Objects – limit the search to only those objects that are currently deselected.
  • All Objects – no limitation; search all objects irrespective of their selection status.
• Identifiers – use this field to further constrain the scope of the search based on the type of text-based object. Choose from the following options:
  • All Identifiers – no limitation; search across all text-based objects (text strings, text frames, pins, net identifiers, and designators).
  • Net Identifiers Only – limit the search to only net identifiers (ports, power ports, sheet entries, off sheet connectors, and net labels).
  • Designators Only – limit the search to only component designators.

Options

• Case sensitive – enable this option to perform a case-sensitive search, meaning the target text must match the case of the search text entered into the Text To Find field.
• Whole Words Only – enable this option to restrict the search to whole words only. This means the search text must exist fully as is and not be part of a larger text string. For example, if this option is enabled, when looking for "cat", the software will not consider the first three letters of "category" - a valid search match. Disable this option to freely search for partial strings.
• Jump to Results – enable this option to have matching/found text zoomed and centered in the design space (where possible). Where a search yields multiple matches, the Find Text - Jump dialog opens. Use this dialog to jump between the matching search results.
• Regular expressions – check to search using regular expressions.
  • ^ – only match when the string is at the start of a line.
  • $ – only match when the string is at the end of a line.
  • . – indicates any single character (e.g., "te.t" matches "test", "text", and "tent", but not "tet").
  • * – indicates any set of characters, including no characters (e.g., "te*" matches "text", "tent", and "te", but not "t").
  • + – indicates any set of characters, except no characters (e.g., "te+" matches "text", and "tent", but not "te").
  • [ ] – find any of the characters enclosed in the brackets.
  • [^] – a caret at the start of a string in brackets means NOT (e.g., "[^tes]" matches any characters except t, e, or s).
  • [-] – a hyphen within a string in brackets signifies a range of characters (e.g., "[l-o]" matches the characters l, m, n, and o).
  • { } – used to group characters or expressions. Groups can be nested with a maximum number of 10 groups in a single pattern.
  • \ – a backslash before a wildcard character tells the schematic editor or schematic library editor to treat that character literally, not as a wildcard (e.g., "\^test" does not look for the string test at the start of a line; it looks for the string "^test").
• Mask Matching – enable this option to have matching text zoomed and/or dimmed in the design space according to settings on the System – Navigation page of the Preferences dialog when the Jump to Results option is enabled.

Note

The found text (or all instances for multiple match results) is also listed in the Messages panel. Double-click a message entry to jump to that text in the design space.