Regex funnies

August 20, 2010 5:15PM

I'm certain Steve has advised me of this previously... but I can't remember. I'm trying to use SearchRegEx to locate certain string patterns, and the RegEx I would normally use is:

[ABC]{1}\d{1}

(I'm tracking paper sizes in a description field). Omniscope doesn't like:

searchregex("[ABC]{1}\d{1}",[Description])

complaining that this is invalid text... I think it's something to do with the square brackets?

August 20, 2010 5:21PM

Found it :) The problem isn't the square bracket - it's the backslash (\) which Omniscope expects to be the start of a comment...

... the solution is to use a double backslash, so for my example above it's:

searchregex("[ABC]{1}\\d{1}",[Description])

steve · August 21, 2010 11:37AM

Yes, all backslashes must be doubled-up in formulas, because a backslash is the escape character, used before quotes and square brackets to insert literal quote/bracket characters into formulas. This is not the case for regex search in the query devices.

steve · November 9, 2011 4:59AM

Update: you can use back-quotes `` in formulae instead of single or double quotes to avoid the need to escape with a backslash. See here:
http://forums.visokio.com/discussion/comment/3436/#Comment_3436

Welcome!

Categories

Ideas Parade

Tagged