In many applications that display textual data, it can be useful to provide a way to search this data for keywords or sequences of text. FindReplaceDialog can be used for this task. The dialog allows us several options to control how a search is to be carried out as well as to specify the string that is being looked for in the data. However, it is the application's responsibility to take this data and perform the actual search. In this recipe, we will take a look at how to retrieve data from the dialog and use it to perform a basic search.
This recipe will use the class created in the previous recipe of this chapter, Selecting files with FileDialog, as a base to show how to use FindReplaceDialog, so you may want to take a quick look back at the preceding recipe before proceeding with this one.