The Find feature supports regular expressions and pattern matching wildcards.
Sun Update Connection – Enterprise assumes that all search strings might be partial strings. You do not need a wildcard for “any characters”. For example, if you search for gimp, the results include gimp, gimp-print, and xsane-gimp.
If you want to restrict the default behavior, to search only for packages that begin with gimp, use: ^gimp. The carrot (outside of brackets) indicates that the string must be the beginning of the pattern.
[char] – Find any of the characters in the brackets.
To find packages dealing with markup languages, either xml or html, search for [xht]ml.
[^char] – Find any of the characters not in the brackets.
If you want to find http packages, but do not want the list of httpd, search for http[^d]
[char-char] – Find a range of characters.
A regular expression of c[a-u]p results in a list that includes cups, cdparanoia-libs, cipe, and libcap.