By default, searches in Emacs ignore the case of the text they are searching through; if you specify searching for ‘FOO’, then ‘Foo’ or ‘foo’ is also considered a match. This applies to regular expressions, too; thus, ‘[aB]’ would match ‘a’ or ‘A’ or ‘b’ or ‘B’.
If you do not want this feature, set the variable
case-fold-search to nil. Then all letters must match
exactly, including case. This is a buffer-local variable; altering the
variable affects only the current buffer. (See Intro to Buffer-Local.) Alternatively, you may change the default value of
case-fold-search.
Note that the user-level incremental search feature handles case distinctions differently. When the search string contains only lower case letters, the search ignores case, but when the search string contains one or more upper case letters, the search becomes case-sensitive. But this has nothing to do with the searching functions used in Lisp code.
This buffer-local variable determines whether searches should ignore case. If the variable is
nilthey do not ignore case; otherwise they do ignore case.
This variable determines whether the higher level replacement functions should preserve case. If the variable is
nil, that means to use the replacement text verbatim. A non-nilvalue means to convert the case of the replacement text according to the text being replaced.This variable is used by passing it as an argument to the function
replace-match. See Replacing Match.