Example Regular Expressions - Fortinet FortiGate Series Administration Manual

Using wildcards and Perl regular expressions

Example regular expressions

Block any word in a phrase
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Table 56: Perl regular expression formats
Expression Matches
abc "abc" (the exact character sequence, but anywhere in the string)
^abc "abc" at the beginning of the string
abc$ "abc" at the end of the string
a|b Either "a" or "b"
^abc|abc$ The string "abc" at the beginning or at the end of the string
ab{2,4}c "a" followed by two, three or four "b"s followed by a "c"
ab{2,}c "a" followed by at least two "b"s followed by a "c"
ab*c "a" followed by any number (zero or more) of "b"s followed by a "c"
ab+c "a" followed by one or more b's followed by a c
ab?c "a" followed by an optional "b" followed by a" c"; that is, either "abc" or"
ac"
a.c "a" followed by any single character (not newline) followed by a" c "
a\.c "a.c" exactly
[abc] Any one of "a", "b" and "c"
[Aa]bc Either of "Abc" and "abc"
[abc]+ Any (nonempty) string of "a"s, "b"s and "c"s (such as "a", "abba",
"acbabcacaa")
[^abc]+ Any (nonempty) string which does not contain any of "a", "b", and "c"
(such as "defg")
\d\d Any two decimal digits, such as 42; same as \d{2}
/i Makes the pattern case insensitive. For example, /bad language/i
blocks any instance of bad language regardless of case.
A "word": A nonempty sequence of alphanumeric characters and low
\w+
lines (underscores), such as foo and 12bar8 and foo_1
100\s*mk The strings "100" and "mk" optionally separated by any amount of white
space (spaces, tabs, newlines)
abc\b "abc" when followed by a word boundary (for example, in "abc!" but not in
"abcd")
perl\B "perl" when not followed by a word boundary (for example, in "perlert" but
not in "perl stuff")
\x Tells the regular expression parser to ignore white space that is neither
preceded by a backslash character nor within a character class. Use this
to break up a regular expression into (slightly) more readable parts.
/x Used to add regular expressions within other text. If the first character in
a pattern is forward slash '/', the '/' is treated as the delimiter. The pattern
must contain a second '/'. The pattern between '/' will be taken as a
regular expressions, and anything after the second '/' will be parsed as a
list of regular expression options ('i', 'x', etc). An error occurs if the
second '/' is missing. In regular expressions, the leading and trailing
space is treated as part of the regular expression.
/block|any|word/
FortiGate Version 4.0 MR1 Administration Guide
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