It sounds easy, but I can not find a possibility to search for files beginning with 8 digits.
Regex are not working with groups.
Starts with: [0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]? does not work either.
Regex are only working with the two actions Scan text
and Scan name
.
According to the help “Search operators” there is the possibility to use the wildcards * and ? (Matches exactly one character). So I tried this 8 times a number exactly one time. But as I wrote, it is not working. Is there a way to do it?
Remove the question marks.
Thanks. But in my case, no results.
Not even “Beginns with” and only one “[0-9]” is showing anything, even though nearly all my files start with a number.
I’m seeing same here with DEVONthink 3.8.6. I also notice on page 227 of the outstanding “DEVONthink Manual” in section “Wildcards” it makes no mention of using numbers as characters to match, whereas the letters [a-b] is shown. I also tried [0|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9] with no result. Perhaps I’m missing something?
I’m wondering if the wild card search only detects letters not numbers? @bluefrog
Begins with
does not work with operators and wildcards. Matches
does. So this is my suggestion:
Please note that it works for me but strangely it did not in the first place, just only after a few tries. Although I do not rule out me being the problem here—I’d never do that!—I suspect there is some odd behaviour on the software side of things.
Given the naming used in DT, I suppose that the NSPredicate
class (begins with
etc). And that one in fact employs Regexes for its matches
operator. There’s a longish explanation of the predicates etc. here
However, DT does not seem to work with Regular Expressions in this context. So, [0-9][0-9][0-9]…
works in your case with matches
, while \d{8}
doesn’t.
I have of course no idea why DT is behaving like that. It may well be the case that it only implements the NSPredicate
expressions without actually using this class. Or something else, entirely. To me, it looks like an arbitrary limitation, and lifting it might be A Good Thing™.
Predicates aren’t used internally but the conditions are similar.