A regular expression or RegEx for short is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern and make searching for information a lot easier, even if you are not a programmer.
With the latest version of 3D Repo, all of our users now have the ability to perform these more advanced searches directly in the platform using RegEx with the new Smart Groups feature. This is great news for our users as they will be able to perform powerful search and replace operations quickly across large numbers of objects in a model to better identify and understand the data.
RegEx will allow users to search parameters and values in their BIM models with more precision and flexibility than a standard search. So when your simple search returns too many results, you can further refine it with regular expressions. For example, you can search for objects that contain specific characters and further narrow down the search results by specifying their placement in the phrase.
Read more about regular expressions here.
RegEx is also great for checking your BIM model is compliant with PAS 1192 naming conventions. There is a lot more you can do with RegEx and there are plenty of examples online. To get started with the basics, try this handy regex editor.
See below for some simple examples of RegEx that you can now use in the 3D Repo platform. Log in to 3D Repo and give it a try.
Examples
Here we take a look at the “LayerName” parameter using the Sample Project (Lego House) in 3D Repo.
Starts with
^A-02
Returns all objects which LayerName starts with “A-02”
Find with either or
^(A-013|A-015)
Returns all objects which LayerName starts with “A-02” or “A-01”
Ends with
Step18$
Matches a text that ends with Step38
End value is in range
Step(3[1-9]|4[0-9])$
Returns all steps from 31 to 49
Followed by
A-(02)*{2}
Matches a text that has “A-” followed by two copies of “02”
Operator OR
A-02(10|40)
Matches a text that has “A-02” followed by “10” or “40”
Check if correct alphanumeric characters used (no -,$,…)
\W
Returns a text with illegal characters
Check for white space
\s
Returns a text with white space[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
