regular expression

A regular expression is a symbolic representation of a pattern of text. Regular expressions are widely used in UNIX text search facilities such as the grep command.

For example, the regular expression

[A-Z0-9._%-]++@[A-Z0-9._%-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}

matches [email protected] and many other email addresses.

Applications

• Parse infer rules (Rule-Parse-Infer rule type) use regular expressions to match text patterns in a supplied input string.
• Transform rules (Rule-Parse-Transform rule type) convert regular expressions into an internal compiled Java format.
• The Search/Replace a String wizard can find and match regular expressions anywhere in all rules of a RuleSet, and substitute another text string.
• Your application can include edit validate rules (Rule-Edit-Validate rule type) that use regular expression pattern matching to validate user inputs. See PDN article How to use regular expressions to validate user input.
• Regular expression rules (Rule-SecurityVA-Regex rule type) support the Rule Security Analyzer.

Support of these facilities is based on the Java implementation of regular expressions (java.util.regex.Pattern).

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