Regular expressions can be a very powerful tool. You can use them to validate email addresses, check whether a value starts with a capital, etc, etc.
You can implement a UDF in SAP PI that does regex matching for you:
 | Pattern r = Pattern.compile(regex); Matcher m = r.matcher(theText); return ""+m.matches(); |
This UDF will return 'true' if a match is found between the text in the first argument and the regular expression in the second; otherwise it returns 'false'.
An example
The input message contains a list of values, and in your mapping you want to pick the one that is an email address.
- A regular expression to check whether a string is an email address is
^[A-z0-9._%+-]+@[A-z0-9.-]+\.[A-z]{2,4}$
For more information on the format of regular expressions, see http://www.vogella.com/articles/JavaRegularExpressions/article.html.