Bedford Tuesday Playford
Search string syntax for finding dances in programmes

The facility for finding dances that appear in programmes of the Tuesday Playford Group, Bedford U.K. requires a 'regular expression'. There is a quick reference to regular expressions at Microsoft and a full explanation at Wikipedia.

A brief outline of some of attributes of the facility:

  1. Case insensitive, so prince matches the dance The Fairy Prince
  2. Matches strings not just whole words, so prince also matches The Real Princess. This behaviour is different to that of the search facility for the rest of the gfoster.info site which searches for words, as do Google, Bing and other web search engines.
  3. Phrases do not need be enclosed in single quotes ' ' or double quotes " ". If single quotes appear within the search string, they are treated as literal characters that are to be found. So lady william's finds Lady William's Delight, but not Lady Williams Delight.
  4. A ? matches 0 or 1 occurences of the previous character. On its own ? does not match an arbitrary single character, unlike many other search facilities. So none?such finds both Nonesuch and Nonsuch, while lady william'?s matches both Lady William's Delight and Lady Williams Delight.
  5. A . (i.e. a full stop), matches any single character including a space.
  6. A * matches 0 or more occurences of the previous character. Therefore, unlike many search facilities, a * on its own does not match an arbitrary sequence of zero or more characters. However the combination .* does. So prince.*favour matches HRH Prince of Wales Favourite
  7. A | means or, so lord|lady finds My Lady Winwood's Maggot, Lady Williams Delight, and Lord Phoppington