Hello, I'm really impressed with the finding and really really couldn't find any reference of it being supported in the game, so I'm sharing this here!
Seems that any search box in the game supports full regex support!!! While this is something maybe 99% of the players are not aware of, this is a really really useful feature for managing trade office or ordinary direct trade between players.
I will show here some examples of regular expressions that may be useful for people in the everyday, you don't need to know the inner regex workings to use them at all. Simple syntax already helps a lot!
For example, say you want to sell skunks for coins in trade office. There's few common characters to make both coins and skunks show in the same filter screen. Also, the last filter used is preserved between offer and cost sides. So while in the offer side, you filter for this:
Then both will show up in the screen without scrolling being needed -- provided you don't have much stuff (like adventures) matching any of the patterns above. If you happen to have, you can fine tune it more, knowing the skunk item is "Drill Sergeant Skunk", you can just, quickly:Code:skunk|coins
or group the wordsCode:^drill|^coins
And have both on screen. Same is useful when you want to ask tricks for fish, or more commonly and throughout the year, steaks for fish. This might be enough:Code:^(drill|coins)
Usually no much fancy needed:Code:^(stea|fis)
Should just do it!Code:stea|fis
Another useful search is if you want to filter by "Add content to deposit: <number> <something>". Where <number> is the amount you or the seller have made available in Trade Office and <something> is what that is. With the regular expression below, you can filter, for example, iron ore refills excluding the unnecessary extracted iron ore:
The circumflex is not really necessary, it just says that the match must begin with that, it matches begin of item name in our case!..Code:^add .* iron
Now, let's fancy something more complex. Say you want to browse refills of gold ore, and you are very rich, so it is only useful for you refills with 1000 or more units in it. Yes, that's possible with renowned regex!!! Here's the pattern to search:
It will match "add" as the initial item name, then anything until it finds a sequence of 4 or more digits (0-9) followed by the "gold" word.Code:^add .* [0-9]{4,} gold
Find deposits for iron or coal? Now I don't care about the amount.
I could combine this with the gold pattern above, if you are wondering. Just replace the gold part with (item1|item2|...|itemN).Code:^add .* (iron|coal)
This is a very useful feature that for obvious reasons (the audience is not supposed nor expected to know regex to play the game!) but a really reaally impressive feature to be implemented, I just by chance found, and no googling around nor forum search gave anything about it.
I would like the opportunity to cumpliment the BlueByte team for implementing search this way, and I hope this thread now helps players take advantage of this feature that's probably in the game since its conception!
The only thing I couldn't really find is, in Trade Office, if I could filter items by their offer/cost status, in other words, if I want to find only refills being sold, or refills being offered, I can't specify it with regexp as far as I could find out! So clicking the offer/cost columns to sort the results is still the only choice.
Hope this helps people with their game experience!!! If anybody knows of anything detailing regex implementation on SO with some additional tricks & treats (in reference of current hallowen event! heh), please don't hesitate on sharing!