Does the net class net pattern system use regular expressions, or not, or sometimes?
In the EESchema docs, near:
there’s this discussion:
Net patterns can use both wildcards (
*to match any number of any characters, including none, and?to match any character) and regular expressions. The nets that match the selected pattern are displayed to the right of the pattern list.
For example, the
net*pattern matches nets namednet,net1,network, and any other net name beginning withnet. Because*has a slightly different meaning in a regular expression (*matches zero or more of the preceding character), thenet*pattern would also match a net namedne.
This seems… either incorrectly documented, or crazy design. Surely matching would implement either “DOS wildcards” behavior for * and ?, OR implement regex, but not a hodge-podge. If both behaviors were offered, then surely it would require some switch to select between them?
Otherwise this would result in high risk of errors. In general, if you want to group (“class-ify”) a bunch of anything by prefix, you specifically DON’T want any shorter name to match.
Like if your schematic has plain “GND”, but also specialized “GND_A”, “GND_B3” and so on, which you might pattern as “GND_*”, you specifically don’t want this pattern to match plain “GND”, which the doc seems to permit. Slightly contrived example, but hopefully conveys the point.
So am I understanding this worng, or ???