This page describes the syntax for string literal expressions in PhixFlow.
All expressions in PhixFlow are written in our specialised JEP scripting language, and every expression resolves to one of the following:
- A regular expresion, following the POSIX style
- A string literal expression
In most input fields you will need to use a string literal expression, and regular expressions are commonly passed to one of the text functions, e.g. replaceAll().
Regular expressions are used for text pattern-matching, whereas string literals can be used both to do literal character matching and provide output values. In simple terms, writing a string literal expression for a string valued field on a stream would result in a (that) string being output to the database, but a regular expression would have no meaning in this context.
Examples:
If you want the string abc"def.
Use single quotes if you want to embed a double quote (or visa versa), or prefix the quote with a backslash:
e.g. 'abc"def' or "abc\"def".
Note how this contrasts to the regular expression case, where a double-backslash is used to escape special characters.