Provisioning Reference Guide › Sample SPML Requests › Escaping Special Characters in Search Filters

Escaping Special Characters in Search Filters

If you need to search for a pattern that includes a special character *, ), (, \ or NULL, it must be escaped using the format '\code' (the code is actually the 2 hexadecimal characters representing the ASCII character) as follows:

• \2a replaces or escapes *
• \28 replaces or escapes (
• \29 replaces or escapes )
• \5c replaces or escapes \
• \00 replaces or escapes NULL

Escaped Search Examples

(name=*\2a*) # searches for * anywhere in the name

(file=d:\5cmyfile.html) # searches for d:\myfile

(description=*\28*\29) # searches for both ( and ) anywhere and in that order

(bin=\5b\04) # searches for binary values (or unicode characters) 5b04