Emacs-style Regex in Info-reader?

Question

I am a Vim-user lost in the Emacs-style Regex of Info-reader. I want to match:

$ info find
?How-in-Info-reader?    :%s#\(\\;.*\\+\)\|\(\\+.*\\;\)#WORKS!#g
INFO:                   "C-X n" to go through the matches

I am looking for the Emacs-counterpart for the Vim-command marked with "?How-in-Info-reader?".

How can you find the matches in Info-reader?

Answer 1

I think you're trying to replace either backslash-semi-anystring-backslashes or backslashes-anystring-backslash-semi with "WORKS!" everywhere in the file. It doesn't look like info is an editor. it doesn't even look like it has regex searching. In emacs, I'd type esc-control-s (to get incremental regular expression search, which means you can try out expressions and see how they work).

Once you're in emacs, the search string you presented should work just fine if I've understood your question. You can also type Esc-r, and then type the first string ("\(\\;.*\\+\)\|\(\\+.*\\;\)"), a RETURN, and the replacement string ("#WORKS!").

Answer 2

For the standalone info reader, your choices are more limited than when using Emacs proper for browsing *info* pages.

I'm not familiar with the details of ?How-in-Info-reader, but there are two ways (I can see to search in the standalone info browser.

M-x index-apropos SOMESTRING

will give you a list of all the index nodes which contain SOMESTRING.

And the other searches C-s (for interactive search) and / or s (non-interactive search) for a particular string in the current view (they don't drop down into the nodes).