Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"J. Lewis Muir" <[email protected]> · Thu, 8 Sep 2016 11:45:31 -0500

On 09/07, Andrew Johnson wrote:
> On 09/07/2016 03:02 PM, Mooney, Tim M. wrote:
> > 
> > Turns out EPICS won't load a record whose name starts with '.'
> 
> The IOC does reject attempts to create a record whose name has any of
> the characters space, double-quote, single-quote, dot or dollar sign in
> it anywhere, not just at the beginning of the name. That is the only
> enforced naming limitation at the moment.

Hi, Andrew!

It would be great if the Application Developer's Guide could be updated
to state this.  In section 6.3.2 of the 3.14.12.5 version of the
Application Developer's Guide ([1]) it says:

  6.3.2 Unquoted Strings

  In the summary section, some values are shown as quoted strings and
  some unquoted. The actual rule is that any string consisting of only
  the following characters does not have to be quoted unless it contains
  one of the above keywords:

  a-z A-Z 0-9 _ - : . [ ] < > ;

  These are also the legal characters for process variable names. Thus
  in many cases quotes are not needed.

As you can see, dot is clearly in the character list, and the sentence
right below it says those characters are the legal characters for PV
names.

Thanks,

Lewis

[1] http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/base/R3-14/12-docs/AppDevGuide/node7.html#SECTION00730000000000000000

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System