You can also create additional variables with regular expressions in ELO Dropzone that can be used to define tiles. Regular expressions can be used as filter criteria in the text search by comparing the text with the pattern of the regular expression. For example, it is possible to select all words from a list of words that start with the letter S and end in the letter D – without having to explicitly specify the words in between or the number of letters. This section guides you through the wizard for creating regular expressions.

Opening the wizard

Open the wizard for regular expressions as follows:

1. Open the ELO Dropzone context menu.

2. Click the Regular expressions menu item.

The ELO Dropzone RegEx configuration wizard for creating regular expressions opens.

Available expressions

You see all regular expressions defined so far in the Available expressions column.

New

Use the New button to add a new regular expression.

Delete

Use the Delete button to delete the selected regular expression.

Type, name, and source

Select the type of regular expression and enter a name to the Name field. Use the Source area to load sample documents or enter sample information.

You can select the following types from the drop-down menu.

Text: Refers to information from the full text content of a file. This can be a Microsoft Word or PDF document. The keywords from a PDF are added to the full text database. To see which information can be read, drag a sample document to the Source area. Alternative: Copy the required full text contents to the Source area.

Title: Refers to information that can be extracted from the window titles of all running programs. The extracted window titles are displayed in the Source field.

File: refers to a file path. To see which information can be read, drag a sample document to the Source area.

Clipboard: Refers to information that can be extracted from the contents of the Windows Clipboard. The contents of the Windows Clipboard are displayed in the Source area.

Barcode: Refers to information from a document with barcodes. Drag a sample document to the Source area. ELO Dropzone recognizes all barcodes in the entire document. If a document has multiple barcodes, you will have to use regular expressions to separate the individual barcodes.

OCR: If you click [OCR], you can also evaluate the current window contents with OCR.

1. Open the OCR-readable file (e.g. a TIFF image) you want to evaluate.

2. Click [OCR].

3. Click the window contents of the file.

The OCR text is displayed in the Source field.

Reg. Ex. and result

Once you have selected the type, entered the name, and loaded a sample document, you can adjust the regular expression in the Reg.Ex. field to obtain the desired results pattern.

You have the following options:

• Entries via a submenu
• Direct entry via the Reg. Ex. input field

The following will describe the path via the submenu:

Example: Website

1. Click the Reg. Ex. button to create the regular expression.

The submenu for creating the regular expression opens.

2. Determine the type of character (numbers, text or date) that you are looking for using the buttons in the Search term area. Different settings area available depending on the selected type.

3. Define the regular expression via the fields in the submenu.

To search for the name of a website that you know uses a specific domain, define the expression as in the figure above.

4. Click Insert to apply your regular expression.

The regular expression is entered to the Reg. Ex. input field.

Information: Click the area below the submenu if you want to stop creating the regular expression.

In the Result area, you see the search result found for the regular expression you entered.

Information: This only returns the character string determined via the part of the regular expression in parentheses.

Optional: Manually adjust the regular expression in the Reg. Ex. input field until the regular expression returns the desired result.

Save

5. Click Save to save the regular expression once you have defined the regular expression.

The ELO Dropzone RegEx configuration dialog box closes.

Example with multiple groups

The following example shows how to get return values from multiple groups.

1. Create a new Text type regular expression.

2. Enter a sample text to the Source area. In our example, we want to get the two values from Rechnung and Invoice.

3. In the Reg.Ex. area, enter the regular expression as shown in the image above. With the DZRESULT annotation, the second group is also selected. In our example, this is Invoice.

With this selection, you receive both return values, in this case "4711" and "12345".

Using tiles

Newly defined regular expressions are saved to the ELO repository in the extra text of the Global folder: Administration // Dropzone // Global

The regular expressions can be used to define tiles as additional variables.

Information: If required, load a sample document to see all existing variables.

Additional display

In the header area of ELO Dropzone, you see the window title of the last program you opened if it matches the last regular expression you created for the Title type.

Overview

The table below contains a list of basic regular expressions and their meanings.

Information: If you want to use a regular expression to create all types of line breaks, \n is not specific enough. In this case, use the regular expression (?:\r\n|\n|\r).