Discuss this help topic in SecureBlackbox Forum
File masks and regular expressions
Some methods let you specify the mask for file operation. The mask lets you filter the set of files (or in some cases directories) being processed. For example, to process just text files, you can specify the mask "*.txt".
In SecureBlackbox Mask parameter can be used in one of three forms:
Simple mask.
With this mask you use wildcard characters ("*" denotes zero or more characters, and "?" denotes exactly one character) to form a filter.
Example: "song?*.mp3" will tell the component to process all files, whose name starts with "song" (but is not just "song") and has ".mp3" extension.
Set of masks. This form lets you specify more than one mask for one operation. Notation of the single mask is the same as in case of simple mask.
Masks are separated with pipe ("|") character.
Example: "song?*.mp3|song?*.wma" will match any .mp3 or .wma file, whose name starts with "song".
Regular expressions (available in .NET edition and in VCL edition with Delphi XE or C++Builder XE and later). Regular expression is a powerful tool to find, match and in some cases replace text according to the given pattern. Regular expressions passed to SecureBlackbox components must start with "regex:" prefix. The prefix is stripped, then the expressions are passed to .NET or VCL built-in regular expression engine without further modifications or processing. So all syntax rules and limitations of the engine apply to the provided expression. Invalid expression would cause an exception on processing, and this exception will be passed unchanged back to your code.
Since SecureBlackbox version 13, file masks in group operations support expressions.
