In Orchestrator, regular expressions enable you to match a string to a pattern. The regular expression can contain a number of different elements that define the pattern. Smart Link Properties use regular expressions to perform pattern matching.

For additional help, please refer to the on-line documentation for System Center 2012 - Orchestrator.

Advanced Regular Expressions

To build regular expressions, you must create an expression that contains the text that you are searching for and special characters that create a pattern which describes how the text that you are searching for appears.

Character Meaning

.

Matches any character except a newline.

*

Matches the preceding item 0 or more times. For example, the "a*" pattern matches any string of a's in a row "a", "aaa", "aaaaaaaaaaaa", and an empty string "". To match any string of any character, use a dot followed by an asterisk. For example "a.*" matches any text that begins with the letter "a" and ends with any string of characters such as "abbb", "abcdef", or "automatic restart".

+

Matches the preceding item 1 or more times. This is like * but you must have a least 1 of the preceding item to make a match. For example, the "ab+" pattern matches "abbbbb", "ab", but does not match "a". To contrast, the "ab*" pattern matches "a".

?

Matches the preceding item 0 or 1 time. For example, the "ab?" pattern matches "a" or "ab" but does not match "abbb".

|

Matches either the preceding expression or the following expression. Logical OR operator.

$

Matches the expression at the end of the input or line. For example, "ab$" matches "I took a cab" or "drab" but does not match "absolutely not".

^

Matches the expression at the beginning of the input or line. For example, "^ab" matches "absolutely not" or "abacuses are great!" but does not match "I took a cab" or "drab".

\

For characters that are usually treated as special. This indicates that the next character is literal and is not to be treated as a special character. For example, "\." means match the "." character and not just any character.

[ ]

A character set. Matches any one of the enclosed characters. You can specify a range of characters by using a hyphen. For example, [a-zA-Z] matches any letter of the alphabet.

[^ ]

An excluded character set. This is the opposite of []. If any of the characters inside the brackets exist, the regular expression match fails. You can specify a range of characters by using a hyphen. For example, [^a-zA-Z] makes sure that none of the letters in the alphabet are present.

( )

A group expression. This groups an expression into an item that you can apply special characters to. For example, "a*(ba)+" matches "ba" "aba" or "ababa" but does not match "abbba" or "abaa"

Examples

Expression Meaning

[a-zA-Z]+

The text contains only letters of the alphabet.

^\*

The text begins with an asterisk.

(abc|def)$

The end of the text is either "abc" or "def".

Ha..y

The text begins with "Ha" followed by any two characters followed by a "y".

Help.*

The text is "Help" followed by any number of other characters.