Brocade Communications Systems NetIron CES 2000 Series Hardware Installation Manual page 68

Using special characters in regular expressions
whois
write
As with the commands for filtering output from show commands, the search string is a regular
expression consisting of a single character or string of characters. You can use special characters to
construct complex regular expressions. See the next section for information on special characters
used with regular expressions.
Using special characters in regular expressions
You use a regular expression to specify a single character or multiple characters as a search string. In
addition, you can include special characters that influence the way the software matches the output
against the search string. These special characters are listed in the following table.
TABLE 12
Character Operation
.
*
+
?
^
$
68
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Special characters for regular expressions
The period matches on any single character, including a blank space.
For example, the following regular expression matches "aaz", "abz", "acz", and so on, but not just
"az":
a.z
The asterisk matches on zero or more sequential instances of a pattern.
For example, the following regular expression matches output that contains the string "abc", followed
by zero or more Xs:
abcX*
The plus sign matches on one or more sequential instances of a pattern.
For example, the following regular expression matches output that contains "de", followed by a
sequence of "g"s, such as "deg", "degg", "deggg", and so on:
deg+
The question mark matches on zero occurrences or one occurrence of a pattern.
For example, the following regular expression matches output that contains "dg" or "deg":
de?g
NOTE
Normally when you type a question mark, the CLI lists the commands or options at that CLI level that
begin with the character or string you entered. However, if you enter Ctrl-V and then type a question
mark, the question mark is inserted into the command line, allowing you to use it as part of a regular
expression.
A caret (when not used within brackets) matches on the beginning of an input string.
For example, the following regular expression matches output that begins with "deg":
^deg
A dollar sign matches on the end of an input string.
For example, the following regular expression matches output that ends with "deg":
deg$
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