Can metacharacters be used in a select prompt?

[Chris Sharman]

>Quick question:  HP3000 PH 8.1.9 C2
> 
>I know that you can use something like bell@ in a field when supplying
select >values in select mode, but is there a way to supply metacharacter
patterns?  I >know I can write the code to make this work but I don't want
to write code.  I >want to use native PH to do the work.
 
Yes.

The user should enter % to say treat this expression as a pattern.

eg "%^(#|^)* *" for an identifier (alpha optionally followed by
alphanumerics, with space padding to the end of the field).

On a similar line, does anyone know how to have metacharacters treated
normally when entering a choose parm ?
Eg, we have email addresses keyed, but the find doesn't work, because the
"@" always gets treated specially (PH 710G3, VMS 7.3). I'd thought it was
only special at the end of an expression, but that doesn't seem to be the
case. In fact I don't know what it means in the middle of an expression, but
it finds precious little.

Chris


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