search for words separated by 1-n characters?

[kaston]

i want to do a regular expression search in a word doc that will let me find
two strings separated by say 50 characters or less, assuming carriage returns
are considered characters. so if i want to find the strings "blah" and "ya"
i tried the expression blah?{1,50}ya hoping that the ?{1,50} would specify
1-50 single characters of any type. but this finds blah and ya even if they
are separated by hundreds of characters. what am i doing wrong?

thanks,
kaston

 

[macropod]

Hi kaston,

Without seeing the rest of the expression, it's a bit hard to say what you might be doing wrong.