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Searching Wikipedia titles with grep
Grep is a tool available on Wikipedia's toolserver.
It has three major abilities/features:
- It searches page titles only
- Its displays results as a single-column list
- It understands regular expressions (for a cheatsheet, see WP:REGEX)
You don't have to worry about Regex to be able to use it. Just type in a term or phrase you want it to search for.
To specify more than one search string in the same search, use (|), like this:
(of Colorado|in Colorado)
That returns a list with titles like Geography of Colorado, Education in Colorado, etc.
Grep also takes spaces into account...
" Colorado" (without the quotes) would look for "Colorado" with a space character in front of it.
To find places in Colorado, search for ", Colorado" (though that won't find all of the places).
To look for a search string that includes parentheses, you have to escape the special meaning of the parentheses characters by placing a backslash in front of each.
Grep is a nice simple place to start experimenting with Regex. Once you get familiar with it, you'll be ready to apply Regex in WikEd and AWB.
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