I’m trying to make a smart group that matches a string like “2014-07-09 - Some note” in the contents of text files.
I tried with “[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9] - [a-z]*” but it doesn’t find anything. It seems to be the [a-z] that doesn’t work. Am I doing it wrong?
Your wildcard is actually working with quotes over here but not without them as wildcards are only applied to words but you’re looking for a phrase.
So is there a way of matching phrases like “2014-07-10 - Some string” while not matching phrases like "2014-07-10 - " ?
Yes, your first wildcard ("[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9] - [a-z]*") should actually do this and does over here with the quotes.
Over here it doesn’t seem to respect the quotes and also matches for example:
“2014-07-10
Some text
Some text -”
It’s not an exact string search, the search uses an index and therefore separators like - are meaningless. The query simply returns a 4-digit number followed by two 2-digit numbers followed by a word and therefore would also match “2014/-/()07#10 !&/()aWord”