General tab - Properties of Format Locator window

Use this tab to determine how the format locator is used in your project.

Advanced

This group has the following settings:

Use results from locator

Enable this setting to use the results from another locator. This setting is cleared by default.

This setting is available only when there are two or more locators in a project and at least one of these locators appear above the current Format Locator in the project hierarchy. This is because locators are processed in order and the results from a previous locator is needed before the current locator can be processed.

If this setting is enabled, the Format Definitions tab is disabled.

Settings for Regular Expressions

This group has the following settings:

Use OCR substitution

Enable this setting if you want to correct commonly misread letters or numbers. This setting is cleared by default.

This setting does not work when a dictionary is inserted in the same format locator.

Define OCR Substitution

Click this button to open the OCR Substitution window and define OCR substitutions.

Settings for Non-Regular Expressions

This group has the following settings:

Maximum search tolerance

This setting helps you to perform a search by allowing for preceding or trailing characters alongside the comparison string. You can use the following equation to calculate the desired search tolerance:

Search Tolerance = 1.00 - Number of Characters (Search String) / Number of Characters (Comparison String)

A value of 0% requires an exact match to the search string and a value of 100% will match everything.

If you are searching a document for word such as "name," the search tolerance can be adjusted so words that contain name are also returned. In order to find words like "names" or "named", the tolerance here needs to allow an extra character or a Maximum search tolerance of 20%. To locate words such as "surname," "jobname," and "unnamed", a value of 43% is required. A value of 50% is required to find words such as "forename" and "username."

The value for this setting is set to 30% by default.

Maximum word count

This setting allows you to extract strings that consist of multiple words.

For example, a phone number that is separated by a hyphen (-) such as 123-456-7890, consists of three words. To ensure that these types of matches are found, the value for this setting must be three or greater.

The value for this setting is set to 6 by default.

Maximum gap between words

This specifies the maximum distance in mm that permits word concatenation during a search. Words that fall outside this measurement are treated as separate words and not included in the current search.

The value for this setting is set to 5mm by default.

Maximum alternative length

This specifies the maximum length that an alternative is allowed. An alternative that exceeds this amount is rejected.

The value for this setting is set to 100mm by default.

Definitions for the buttons at the bottom of this window can be found in Common Transformation Designer Buttons.