System Debug Reference Manual > Appendix A Patterns and Regular Expressions

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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 `.*`)
?: Matches any alphabetic character (same as `[a-zA-Z]`)
#: Matches a numeric character (same as `[0-9]`)

Expression Closure (Match Zero or More of the Previous Expressions)

Appendix B Expression Diagrams