User Guide

274 Chapter 15: Server Behaviors
<searchPattern>
Description
This tag is a pattern that identifies participant text and extracts parameter values from it. Each
parameter subexpression must be enclosed in parentheses ().
You can have patterns with no parameters (which are used to identify participant text), patterns
with one parameter, or patterns with many parameters. All non-optional patterns must be found,
and each parameter must be named and found exactly once.
For more information about using the
searchPattern tag, see “Finding server behaviors”
on page 286.
Parent
searchPatterns
Type
Block tag.
Required
Yes.
Values
searchString
, /regularExpression/, <empty>
• The searchString value is a simple search string that is case-sensitive. It cannot be used to
extract parameters.
• The /regularExpression/ value is a regular expression search pattern.
• The <empty> value is used if no pattern is given. It is always considered a match, and the entire
value is assigned to the first parameter.
In the following example, to identify the participant text
<%= RS1.Field.Items("author_id") %>, you can define a simple pattern, followed by a
precise pattern that also extracts the two parameter values:
<searchPattern>Field.Items</searchPattern>
<searchPattern paramNames="rs,col">
<![CDATA[
/<%=\s*(\w+)\.Field\.Items\("(\w+)"\)/
]]>
</searchPattern>
This example matches the pattern precisely and assigns the value of the first subexpression
(
\w+) to parameter "rs" and the second subexpression (\w+) to parameter "col".
Note: It is important that regular expressions start and end with a slash (/). Otherwise, the
expression is used as a literal string search. Regular expressions can be followed by the regular-
expression modifier "i" to indicate case-insensitivity (as in
/pattern/i). For example, VBScript is
not case-sensitive, so it should use
/pattern/i. JavaScript is case-sensitive and should use /
pattern/
.