The title explains it all but I will add a little bit of context. This is my search string in the browser re:^[^\t]+\t[^<] Am trying to find a note whose First field exists, and second file does not begin with < Apparently the field separator isn’t ,;\t because none works. I can’t use the field…

[image] mbrubeck: re:^[^\x1f]+\x1f[^<] Is that a single character or multiple? Just checked, it not \x1f

It’s a single character, U+001F Information Separator One .

That’s interesting. Thanks a lot. This is definitely not in the docs, is it?

[image] Sweetins: This is definitely not in the docs, is it? Apparently not. I had to look in the Anki source code to figure it out.

It doesn’t work on AnkiDroid.

This is an implementation detail. I don’t think it’s explicitly supported.

Searching is done by the backend so it works on mobile clients as well. This trick won’t work for notetypes that have a field excluded from search, however

It didn’t work in my testing. I don’t really care, but wanted to point it out. Edit: re:^[^\x1f]+\x1f[^<\x1f] ensures that the second field is non-empty.

What is the field separator character when performing regex search (i.e. re:) in the browse window?

Anki Help

mbrubeck September 14, 2025, 8:20pm 2

The separator character is \x1f. Try this expression:

re:^[^\x1f]+\x1f[^<]

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What is the field separator character when performing regex search (i.e. re:) in the browse window?

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