Penn Math

Catalog Search Hints

These hints are for searches the listing of all the Math Reading Room Book collection. The data base contains
Author,   Title,   Publisher,   Subject,   Call Number,   ISBN,   Date
and a few other items. In a pattern
means "OR"          \b   matches a word "boundary"
Accented characters (umlauts etc.) are not found; see accent for some hints.
In ISBN: no spaces or "-".

pattern finds
ring ring rings bring string engineering Springer cringe etc.
\bring ring rings (but not: bring engineering Springer or string)
ring\b ring bring string engineering (but not: rings or Springer)
\bring\b ring Ring RING (but not: rings bring etc.)
algebraic sy algebraic systems     algebraic symbols     etc.
modu|gauss unimodular Gauss gaussian etc. (no spaces around "|" )

The more complicated pattern:

	pattern1 = \blie\b
	pattern2 = represent|algebr|cohomol|deform
locates all books with " lie " and any of "represent", "algebr", "cohomol", or "deform" in their title or as their subject ("\blie\b" means that "lie" appears as a separate word, excluding words like "applied").

If you also enter a second pattern, the (faster) search will match only if both patterns are found. For instance if the first pattern is riemann and the second pattern is geometry , then it will only match entries in which both riemann AND geometry occur somewhere This runs faster if the least likely pattern is placed first. Thus, riemann AND geometry runs faster than geometry AND riemann.

Accented Characters?   Use   .*
Example:
 K.*hler  matches  Kahler ,  Kähler ,  Kaehler , and  kahlerinnes .

For ISBN, insert no spaces or "-".

(rule)

EXPERTS: These are gnu egrep "regular expression" patterns. Here are most of the details from the man page (see above for examples).

Gnu egrep Regular Expressions

       A  regular expression is a pattern that describes a set of
       strings.  Regular expressions are constructed  analogously
       to  arithmetic  expressions, by using various operators to
       combine smaller expressions.

Grep understands two different versions of regular expres- sion syntax: ``basic'' and ``extended.'' In GNU grep, there is no difference in available functionality using either syntax. In other implementations, basic regular expressions are less powerful. The following description applies to extended regular expressions; differences for basic regular expressions are summarized afterwards.

The fundamental building blocks are the regular expres- sions that match a single character. Most characters, including all letters and digits, are regular expressions that match themselves. Any metacharacter with special meaning may be quoted by preceding it with a backslash.

A list of characters enclosed by [ and ] matches any sin- gle character in that list; if the first character of the list is the caret ^ then it matches any character not in the list. For example, the regular expression [0123456789] matches any single digit. A range of ASCII characters may be specified by giving the first and last characters, separated by a hyphen. Finally, certain named classes of characters are predefined. Their names are self explanatory, and they are [:alnum:], [:alpha:], [:cntrl:], [:digit:], [:graph:], [:lower:], [:print:], [:punct:], [:space:], [:upper:], and [:xdigit:]. For example, [[:alnum:]] means [0-9A-Za-z], except the latter form is dependent upon the ASCII character encoding, whereas the former is portable. (Note that the brackets in these class names are part of the symbolic names, and must be included in addition to the brackets delimiting the bracket list.) Most metacharacters lose their special meaning inside lists. To include a literal ] place it first in the list. Similarly, to include a literal ^ place it anywhere but first. Finally, to include a lit- eral - place it last.

The period . matches any single character. The symbol \w is a synonym for [[:alnum:]] and \W is a synonym for [^[:alnum]].

The caret ^ and the dollar sign $ are metacharacters that respectively match the empty string at the beginning and end of a line. The symbols \< and \> respectively match the empty string at the beginning and end of a word. The symbol \b matches the empty string at the edge of a word, and \B matches the empty string provided it's not at the edge of a word.

A regular expression may be followed by one of several repetition operators: ? The preceding item is optional and matched at most once. * The preceding item will be matched zero or more times. + The preceding item will be matched one or more times. {n} The preceding item is matched exactly n times. {n,} The preceding item is matched n or more times. {,m} The preceding item is optional and is matched at most m times. {n,m} The preceding item is matched at least n times, but not more than m times.

Two regular expressions may be concatenated; the resulting regular expression matches any string formed by concate- nating two substrings that respectively match the concate- nated subexpressions.

Two regular expressions may be joined by the infix opera- tor |; the resulting regular expression matches any string matching either subexpression.

Repetition takes precedence over concatenation, which in turn takes precedence over alternation. A whole subex- pression may be enclosed in parentheses to override these precedence rules.

The backreference \n, where n is a single digit, matches the substring previously matched by the nth parenthesized subexpression of the regular expression.

In basic regular expressions the metacharacters ?, +, {, |, (, and ) lose their special meaning; instead use the backslashed versions \?, \+, \{, \|, \(, and \).

In egrep the metacharacter { loses its special meaning; instead use \{.