Aegisub / Select Lines

The select lines tool is useful for finding and selecting all lines in the script that matches certain criteria. This can be useful from a number of things ranging from deleting all comment lines to finding all lines said by a certain actor. The tool can be found in the Subtitles menu -> Select lines.

Select lines.png

Match

These controls what criteria will be used for selecting the lines.

Match
Select all lines that match the criteria.
Doesn't match
Select all lines that don't match the criteria.
Match case
Controls case sensitivity, i.e. if the tool should care about the difference between lower and upper case or not.
Exact match
Matches the lines that matches the given string exactly.
Contains
Matches the lines that contains the given string.
Regular Expression match
Treats the string as a regular expression or "regex", and matches if said expression matches. For a regular expressions tutorial, try reading the perlretut manual page or googling. For a reference of the exact syntax supported by Aegisub, see the wxWidgets regular expressions reference page.

In field

This option controls what field of each line will be used for the matching mentioned above. Possible alternatives are:

Text
The main text field
Style
The style field
Actor
The actor field
Effect
The effect field

Match dialogues/comments

Here you can choose if you want to select from comment lines, dialogue lines, or both.

Action

Decides what the tool should do with the lines that matches the given criteria. You can choose between:

Set selection
Your current selection will be discarded and all lines in the script matching the criteria will be selected instead.
Add to selection
Adds all lines in the script that matches the criteria to your current selection.
Subtract from selection
Deselects all currently selected lines that match the criteria.
Intersect with selection
Does the inverse of subtract from selection. That is to say, all lines in the current selection that matches the criteria are kept selected, but everything else is deselected.