System Debug Reference Manual (32650-90888)

Appendix A 533

Patterns and Regular Expressions

Technical Summary

The following list summarizes the expressions discussed above:

c Literal character

. Any character except newline

^ Beginning of line

$ End of line (null string before newline)

[xyz] Character class (any one of these characters)

[^xyz] Negated character class (all but these characters)

* Closure (zero or more instances of previous pattern)

\c Escaped literal character (for example, \^, \[, \*)

Any special meaning of metacharacters in a regular expression is lost when 1) escaped, 2)

inside [...], or 3) for the following characters:

^ When not at the beginning of an expression

$ When not at end of an expression

* When beginning an expression

A character class consists of zero or more of the following elements, surrounded by ``[``

and ``]":

c Literal characters, including [

a-b Range of characters (digits, lowercase or uppercase)

^ Negated character class if at beginning

\c Escaped character (for example, \^ \- \\ \])

Special meaning of characters in a character class is lost when 1) escaped or 2) for the

following characters:

^ When not at beginning of a character class

- When at beginning or end of a character class

An escape sequence consists of the character \ followed by a single character:

\t tab

\\ \

\c c

System Debug expects regular expressions to be enclosed in back quotes "`".

System Debug commands support MPE XL style wildcard patterns. These are converted

into regular expressions for evaluation.

@ Matches any character (same as `.*`)