Introduction
Universal Controller supports the use of wildcards and regular expressions in the user interface and remote interfaces.
For files, wildcards and regular expressions can be used only in:
- Source file specifications, not destination file specifications. (Under some operating systems, it is possible for * and ? to be valid characters in a file name. If they appear in a destination file, they are treated as file characters, not as wildcards or regular expressions.)
- File name portion of file specifications, not as part of the directory.
Wildcards
Universal Controller supports two wildcards:
- Asterisk (*)
- Question mark (?)
You can use wildcards in record searches and when applying some rule or command against records. Fields that support wildcards are identified in their field description.
Wildcard | Meaning |
---|---|
Asterisk (*) | Represents a wildcard of any number of characters. |
Question mark (?) | Represents a wildcard of one character in a specific position. |
Multiple questions marks | Represent wildcards of multiple characters in a specific position. |
File Name Examples
File Names
test.txt
test1.txt
test2.txt
test3.txt
test.bin
test1.bin
test2.bin
test3.bin
Wildcard Matches
*
,*.*
,test*.*
, andtes?**.
will match all of the files.*.txt
will match files 1 - 4.*.bin
will match files 5 - 8.test?.txt
will match files 2 - 4.
Regular Expressions
Important!
POSIX Extended Regular Expression syntax is used for file name matching and string matching.
Note
You can use regular expressions only on Windows and UNIX operating systems; you cannot use them on z/OS.
File Name Examples
File Names
test.txt
test1.txt
test2.txt
test3.txt
test.bin
test1.bin
test2.bin
test3.bin
Regular Expression Matches
.+
,tes.+
, andte.+[tn]$
will match all of the files..+txt$
will match files 1 - 4..+bin$
will match files 5 - 8.te..[123].+bin$
will match files 6 - 8.
String Examples
C:\UDM\TEST\OUT\LinuxSystem.[D](20)[1-9][1-9][0-1][0-9][0-3][0-9][.][T][0-2][0-9][0-5][0-9][0-5][0-9].* | Matches C:\UDM\TEST\OUT\LinuxSystem.D20171001.T235159.* |
C:\UDM\TEST\OUT\LinuxSystem.[D][1-9][1-9][0-1][0-9][0-3][0-9][.][T][0-2][0-9][0-5][0-9][0-5][0-9].* | Matches C:\UDM\TEST\OUT\LinuxSystem.D171001.T235159.* |
C:\UDM\TEST\OUT\LinuxSystem.[D](20)[1-9][1-9][0-1][0-9][0-3][0-9][.][T][0-2][0-9][0-5][0-9][0-5][0-9].* | Fails C:\UDM\TEST\OUT\LinuxSystem.D2017201033.T235159.* month 20 day 33! |
C:\UDM\TEST\OUT\LinuxSystem.[D][1-9][1-9][0-1][0-9][0-3][0-9][.][T][0-2][0-9][0-5][0-9][0-5][0-9].* | Fails C:\UDM\TEST\OUT\LinuxSystem.D171001.T266159.* hour 26 minutes 61! |