Regular Expression Designer

From any page within the pasTransfer wizard you can press F3 and open the regular expression designer window.

You can use this tool to prototype regular expressions and optionally save them back to the wizard. If the regular expression editor is opened for a macro enabled field, macro expressions may be used. If macro expressions are enabled, a tree view will be displayed on the left side of the window showing a list of all the macro commands that are currently available to you.

The regular expression editor at the top provides an area to create a valid regular expression pattern. The Regular Expression topic provides a detailed listing of meta characters used for creating a regular expression.

Beneath the regular expression editor you may enter data to test your regular expression against. By default, every line will be tested against the regular expression during testing. To interpret the test data as a single string uncheck the Split sample data into individual lines for testing check box.

The results window will appear at the bottom of the screen after a regular expression has been tested. The top of the results section will show the exact regular expression that was used for testing. If a macro expression was used on a macro-enabled field, this will show the resolved expression. If the regular expression pattern is syntactically incorrect, an error message will be displayed explaining why the expression was invalid. The grid at the bottom of the results section will show each matched pattern in each matching line of test data, as well as the match start position and match length.

At the bottom of the page are several buttons:

•Reset - Resets any temporal values associated with any macro expressions that may have been used in the regular expression pattern (such as the Increment macro command).

•Test - Tests the macro expression against the test data in order to view the results. Pressing F5 will also execute the test.

•Save - Saves the regular expression pattern back to the control the designer was opened from.

•Clear - Clears the regular expression pattern.

•Cancel - Exits the regular expression designer without saving back to the control the designer was opened from.

Send comments on this topic.