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01-28007-0144-20041217
Fortinet Inc.
Using Perl regular expressions
Spam filter
Regular expression vs. wildcard match pattern
In Perl regular expressions, ‘.’ character refers to any single character. It is similar to
the ‘?’ character in wildcard match pattern. As a result:
• fortinet.com not only matches fortinet.com but also matches fortinetacom,
fortinetbcom, fortinetccom and so on.
To match a special character such as '.' and ‘*’ use the escape character ‘\’. For
example:
• To mach fortinet.com, the regular expression should be: fortinet\.com
In Perl regular expressions, ‘*’ means match 0 or more times of the character before it,
not 0 or more times of any character. For example:
• forti*\.com matches fortiiii.com but does not match fortinet.com
To match any character 0 or more times, use ‘.*’ where ‘.’ means any character and
the ‘*’ means 0 or more times. For example, the wildcard match pattern forti*.com
should therefore be fort.*\.com.
Word boundary
In Perl regular expressions, the pattern does not have an implicit word boundary. For
example, the regular expression “test” not only matches the word “test” but also
matches any word that contains the “test” such as “atest”, “mytest”, “testimony”,
“atestb”. The notation “\b” specifies the word boundary. To match exactly the word
“test”, the expression should be \btest\b.
Case sensitivity
Regular expression pattern matching is case sensitive in the Web and Spam filters. To
make a word or phrase case insensitive, use the regular expression
/i
For example,
/bad language/i
will block all instances of “bad language” regardless of case.
Table 30: Perl regular expression formats
Expression
Matches
abc
abc (that 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 of a and b
^abc|abc$
the string abc at the beginning or at the end of the string
ab{2,4}c
an a followed by two, three or four b's followed by a c
ab{2,}c
an a followed by at least two b's followed by a c
ab*c
an a followed by any number (zero or more) of b's followed by a c
ab+c
an a followed by one or more b's followed by a c
ab?c
an a followed by an optional b followed by a c; that is, either abc or ac
a.c
an 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
Summary of Contents for FortiGate FortiGate-60M
Page 12: ...Contents 12 01 28007 0144 20041217 Fortinet Inc Index 369 ...
Page 44: ...44 01 28007 0144 20041217 Fortinet Inc Changing the FortiGate firmware System status ...
Page 74: ...74 01 28007 0144 20041217 Fortinet Inc FortiGate IPv6 support System network ...
Page 82: ...82 01 28007 0144 20041217 Fortinet Inc Dynamic IP System DHCP ...
Page 116: ...116 01 28007 0144 20041217 Fortinet Inc Access profiles System administration ...
Page 234: ...234 01 28007 0144 20041217 Fortinet Inc Protection profile Firewall ...
Page 246: ...246 01 28007 0144 20041217 Fortinet Inc CLI configuration Users and authentication ...
Page 278: ...278 01 28007 0144 20041217 Fortinet Inc CLI configuration VPN ...
Page 340: ...340 01 28007 0144 20041217 Fortinet Inc Using Perl regular expressions Spam filter ...
Page 358: ...358 01 28007 0144 20041217 Fortinet Inc CLI configuration Log Report ...
Page 376: ...376 01 28007 0144 20041217 Fortinet Inc Index ...
