OmegaT provides a powerful range of search functions. Call up the Search window with Ctrl+F
and enter the word or phrase you wish to search for in the Search for box.
Alternatively, in the Editor window, select a word or phrase in the editing field (target text of the active segment) and hit Ctrl+F
. The word or phrase is entered in the Search for box automatically in this case.
Calling up the Search window anew will create a new instance of the window. You may end up with a number of Search windows if you forget to close them.
Searches occur both in the source as well as in the target section of the project. You may search in
In the latter case, OmegaT will only search the files it can read (See Supported File Formats).
Select the method using the radio buttons. You can choose between two methods to search:
For either of these two methods you can select the following three options:
An exact search looks for a phrase, i.e. if several words are entered, they are found only if they occur in exactly the same sequence. Exact searches are similar to an "exact phrase" search in an Internet search engine such as Google.
Select keyword search to search for any number of individual words, separated by spaces and in any order. OmegaT will display a list of all segments in which all the words occur. Keyword searches are similar to a search "with all of the words" in an Internet search engine such as Google (AND logic).
In both exact and keyword searches, the wild card search characters '*
' and '?
' can be used. To use wild cards, make sure the option regular expressions is not selected, otherwise these characters are interpreted as special regular expression characters.
The '*' character matches zero or more characters (the search term 'run*' would match 'run', 'runs', and 'running', for example).
The '?' character matches exactly one character ('run?' would match 'runs' and 'rung', for example, but not 'run' or 'running').
If you wish to search for segments containing either * or ?, you will need to switch on regular expressions, and escape these characters by prefixing a backslash ('\') to them, i.e. 'x\*y' to find instances of 'x*y' and 'x\?y
' to find instances of 'x?y
'.
A regular expression search is a powerful way to look for instances of a string. It is similar to a wild card search, but allows far more flexibility.
The regular expressions used in searches are those supported by Java. A short summary is available in the Regular Expressions Constructs appendix.
If you need more specific information, please consult http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html.
You can find simple tutorials on the web (http://www.regular-expressions.info/quickstart.html, for example.)
Pressing the search button after entering a string in the search field will display all the segments in the project that include the searched string. As OmegaT handles all the identical segments as one entity, only the first unique segment is shown.
The segments are displayed in order of appearance in the project. Translated segments will be displayed with the original text at the top and the translated text at the bottom, non translated segments will be displayed in original text only.
You may click on a segment to bring it up in the Editor for modification. Then you may switch back to Search window and go to the next found segment to modify it too. Such a pattern is useful to do terminology updates.