Help on Vizier-like expressions

The UCL DaCHS server supports search expressions modelled after what CDS' Vizier service provides. Our implementation is not yet complete. If you need a given feature, please let us know.

The rough idea is that you can specify the values you search for with certain operators, depending on the type of the field you are matching against.

Vizier-like expressions for numeric values

Overview

For numeric expressions, you can use the following operators:

• No operator: this is equivalent to =.
• Comparisons: The operators <, <=, >, >=, =, != are prefixed and behave like their mathematical counterparts.
• Enumeration: You can enumerate values you are interested in using the comma (",") operator.
• Range: To specify a range of acceptable values, use the ".." operator. Note that you must surround this operator with whitespace; alternatively, you can give "value and error" with the "+/-" operator.
• Logical operators: The operators ! (not), & (and), and | (or) provide simple logic. The precendence is in the given sequence. If you need to do fancy things here, contact us and we will add support for grouping (parentheses)

Examples

• 50 or =50 -- select only values exactly 50
• !=50 -- select only values different from 50
• < 60.0; > 4e-8; >= -.5; <= -5.e13 -- selects values smaller, greater, greater or equal to their operands.
• 50. .. 80.5 -- selects values between 50 and 80.5 inclusive.
• 50 +/- 10 -- selects values between 40 and 60 inclusive.
• 40, 50, 50.5, 60 -- select any of the enumerated values.
• !40, 50, 50.5, 60 -- select anything other than the enumerated values.
• 40 | 100 +/- 5 -- select values equal to 40 or between 95 and 105.

Grammar

For those into such things, here is the grammar we currently use to parse numeric expressions (the base nonterminal is expr).

	preOp    ::= "=" |  ">=" | ">" | "<=" | "<"
	rangeOp  ::= ".."
	pmOp     ::= "+/-" | "\xb1"  (this is the ± character)
	orOp     ::= "|"
	andOp    ::= "&"
	notOp    ::= "!"
	commaOp  ::= ","

	preopExpr  ::= [preOp]  floatLiteral
	rangeExpr  ::= floatLiteral rangeOp  floatLiteral
	valList    ::= floatLiteral { commaOp floatLiteral }
	pmExpr     ::= floatLiteral pmOp floatLiteral
	simpleExpr ::= rangeExpr | pmExpr | valList | preopExpr

	notExpr    ::= [notOp] simpleExpr
	andExpr    ::= notExpr {andOp + notExpr}
	expr       ::= andExpr {orOp + expr}

floatLiteral is a usual C decimal integer or float literal.

Vizier-like expressions for dates

Overview

Dates support the same operators as numeric operands, except that the "error" in expressions with +/- is a simple float. Dates are given in one the the VO's preferred ISO formats, i.e., YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DDTHH-MM-SS. Times without dates are not yet supported. In general, we try to interpret dates without times in a sensible way; for instance, if you just give a date, all records with a timestamp on that date will match.

Examples

See also the examples for numeric expressions.

• <2003-04-06 -- select values earlier than April 6th, 2003.
• 2003-04-06 +/- 4 -- select values four days around April 6th, 2003.

Grammar

The grammar is identical to the one of numeric expressions, except that floatLiteral is dateLiteral with the exception of pmExpr that is

pmExpr := dateLiteral pmOp floatLiteral

here. The dates themselves currently follow the regular expression [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]. This will be relaxed in the future.

Vizier-like expression for strings

Overview

Note: Contrary to what Vizier does, the default on string expressions on this site is to match expressions literally (i.e., the default operator is == rather than ~).

Some of the operators below work on patterns. A pattern contains the meta characters [, ], *, and ?; all others are "normal" characters matched literally. The * matches zero or more characters, the ? exactly one; characters in square brackets match any character enumerated within them. You can use ranges like "A-Z" within square brackets. If the first character in the square brackets is a caret (^), all characters except the ones listed are matched.

The following operators can be used when matching strings -- when we talk about literals as operands, metacharacter interpretation is suppressed (i.e., the strings are matched literally), otherwise we talk about patterns.

Note that both patterns and literally interpreted strings must match the whole data field. This is substantially different from the usual regular expression engines (but corresponds to what you may know from filename patterns).

• == -- matches if your input matches the entire input field literally, i.e., preserving case. This is the default when no operator is given, but it may be necessary to use the operator if, e.g., your pattern would be interpreted as an expression.
• =~ -- Like ==, but ignoring case.
• ~ -- selects pattern matches of operand ignoring case.
• = -- case-sensitive version of ~.
• !~ -- reversal of ~ (i.e., matches when ~ doesn't).
• ! -- reversal of =.
• != -- selects all but literal matches of the operand.
• >=, >, <=, < -- selects strings larger or equal, larger, etc., than the operand. Comparisons happen according to ASCII value (i.e., in the C locale).
• =, and =| -- these start enumerations, i.e., they match when a literal in the following list is matched. There are two versions of these so you can include either the comma or the vertical bar in your literals. If you need both, you are out of luck.

Examples

Here is a table of expressions and their matches:

Expression	Data
	M4e	M4ep	m4e	A4p	O4p	M*	m|a	x,a	=x
M4e	X
=x
== =x									X
!= =x	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X
==M4e	X
=~m4e	X		X
=~m4
~*	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X
~m*	X	X	X			X	X
M*						X
!~m*				X	X			X	X
~*p		X		X	X
!~*p	X		X			X	X	X	X
~?4p				X	X
~[MO]4[pe]	X		X		X
=[MO]4[pe]	X				X
>O			X		X		X	X
>O5			X				X	X
>=m			X				X	X
<M				X					X
=|M4e| O4p| x,a	X				X			X
=,x,a,=x,m|a							X		X

Maybe some comments are in order:

1. =x matches nothing since the leading = is interpreted as an operator ("match as pattern case-insensitively"), and there is nothing matching the pattern x in the sample (in this case , only x and X would match).
2. == =x is the simplest way to search for "=x" -- its analogues work for all other metacharacters as well.
3. =~m4 matches nothing, because the pattern has to match the entire string, and all strings in the sample have some annexes to their variations of m4.
4. M* only matches "M*" since the default on our system is literal matching. This expression would have behaved completely differently on Vizier.

Grammar

The following grammar describes the parsing of string expressions:

	simpleOperator   ::= "==" | "!=" | ">=" | ">" | "<=" | "<"
	simpleOperand    ::= Regex(".*")
	simpleExpr       ::= simpleOperator + simpleOperand
	
	commaOperand     ::= Regex("[^,]+")
	barOperand       ::= Regex("[^|]+")
	commaEnum        ::= "=," commaOperand { "," commaOperand }
	exclusionEnum    ::= "!=," commaOperand { "," + commaOperand }
	barEnum          ::= "=|" barOperand { "|" + barOperand }
	enumExpr         ::= exclusionEnum | commaEnum | barEnum

	patLiterals      ::= CharsNotIn("[*?")
	wildStar         ::= "*"
	wildQmark        ::= "?"
	setElems         ::= CharsNotIn("]")
	setSpec          ::= "[" + setElems + "]"
	patElem          ::= setSpec | wildStar | wildQmark | patLiterals
	pattern          ::= patElem { patElem }

	patternOperator  ::= "~" | "=" | "!~" | "!"
	patternExpr      ::= patternOperator pattern

	stringExpr       ::= enumExpr | simpleExpr | patternExpr | nakedExpr