With vEdit's Pattern Matching you can searching for hexadecimal, octal or decimal values. With normal pattern matching use “|Hhh” to search for hex value ‘hh’ Similarly, use “|Oooo” to search for octal value ‘ooo’. Use “|ddd” to search for decimal value ‘ddd’.

|Hhh
Match the character with hex value ‘hh’. Both digits must be present. Each hex value must be preceded with “|H”.
|Oooo
Match the character with octal value ‘ooo’. All three digits must be present.
|ddd
Match the character with decimal value ‘ddd’.

Examples of Pattern Matching Searches

|h74|h68|h65
Search for the word “the” in hex.
|o164|o150|o14
Search for the word “the” in octal.

|” is the “pipe” character, which is Shift-\ on the keyboard. All pattern matching codes begin with this character. When you enter a letter in hex, decimal or octal, the search automatically becomes case-sensitive.

Since it is tedious to precede hex values with “|H”, you can alternatively select the “()Hex” search mode. In this mode, all search characters are entered as two-character hex codes, “00” through “ff”, followed by a space. This is identical to the way characters are displayed in VEDIT’s Hex mode.

For example, to search for “ABC123”, enter:

41 42 43 31 32 33

Alternatively, hex words, double-words and quad-words can be entered without spaces, but with an optional “:”. The most significant byte is entered first. Therefore, the following are equivalent:

0a496e79 23fa45e8 0a49:6e79 23fa:45e8 79 6e 49 0a e8 45 fa 23

In hex-mode, only simple searches, without pattern matching, are supported. The search is also case-sensitive.

Entering Numbers in Hexadecimal

At any prompt for a number, e.g. GOTO > Line #, you can enter a hexadecimal value by preceding it with “0x” or “0h”. Enter an octal value by preceding the octal digits with “0o”. You can also enter numeric expressions and mixed-radix expressions. Example of a mixed-radix numeric expression:

(0x3A6FF + 1000) / 2

Related Resources