A character pattern is a coded value which describes the character shape of a data value.
There are six types of patterns:
- Default
- Rich
- Long
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Turkish
The repository administrator configures the encoding for these patterns when he or she creates or edits the repository in the Repository Manager application. You can also customize other patterns to suit your business needs.
How to Read Patterns
Patterns are character representations of a data value in short-hand notation. The short-hand code is obtained during data discovery (when a data source is loaded) by counting the number of characters represented by the code.
In the default pattern encoding, a means alpha, d means digit, p means punctuation, and so on. Wherever duplicate character codes occur in sequence (such as aaaa for four alphabetic characters in a row), a number is used to indicate how many alphabetic letters occur. In this case, the "aaaa" pattern is represented as "a4". Using the default pattern, the data value "Jane Smith" is therefore represented as "a4_a5".
When examining patterns, you can choose to display patterns for attribute values, or find values based on a pattern code. Before you examine a pattern, learn more about the encoding conventions used by a pattern.