Please add Regular Expression support to Search

Question

Search in WikiTree would be greatly improved with Regular Expression support as a search option. Using that option, for example, I could search on the surname “Nel+[ie]s”, which would match on common historical variations of my surname, Nellis, including Nelles and Nelis. This is just a simple example; much more complicated searches would be possible. Regular expressions are a well-supported in software development libraries (including JavaScript and PHP). This would have to be made optional so that users who don’t want to use the feature are not hindered by it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

Comments

From your description, this sounds like it could be a powerful improvement for WikiTree. Variant names can be a major challenge here.

For now, I assume you are aware that wildcard searches (using both * and ?) work in the WIkiTree name search.

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No, I didn't! Thanx! So many hidden features!

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From what I understand the search server we use doesn't support regular expressions in the text of the search query.

But as Ellen noted, * and ? are allowed which should help a bit.

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Thanks for checking into that, Jamie.