Where's It Used ?

• in the If condition of an action, when the ~ (match) or !~ (not match) operators are specified.
• in text paremeters of State and Event contexts
• some other places :-)

Matching Rules

• if a pattern is left blank, it will match against anything
• if it is not blank it must match the whole target text
• / means 'or', it divides up multiple possible matches
• a * will match any number of any character. It's not possible to specifically match a * character.
• a + will match one or more of any character. It's not possible to specifically match a + character.
  Beware: the condition '%var matches +' will be true if %var has not been assigned a value, because Tasker does not replace variables which do not have a value.
• matching is case-insensitive (magic will match with MagiC) unless the pattern contains an upper-case letter e.g. Magic* will not match against magically, but it will match against Magic Roundabout
• a ! at the very start of a match means not e.g. !*Magic*/*Yellow* matches anything not containing the words Magic or Yellow
• it is not possible to specifically match a ! character at the start of a target (but you could use *!

Examples

• help matches help but not helper.
• help* matches helper
• *the* matches the (anywhere)
• 123+ matches 123 and minimally one more character
• + matches anything with at least one character (non-empty)
• the*way matches the other way and the first way, amongst others
• Help/*shell matchs Help or anything ending with shell, case-sensitively

Caller Matching

• C:ANY matches the telephone number of any contact
• C:FAV matches the telephone number of any favourite (starred) contact
• CG:groupmatch matches the telephone number of a contact in a group which matches groupmatch
• Otherwise: otherwise a match is attempted using the general matching rules against both the caller phone number and the associated contact's name (if there is one).

Examples:

• !C:ANY matches a number not belonging to a contact
• 077*/Geoff* matches a number starting with 077 or belonging to a contact whose names starts with Geoff
• C:FAV/0123456789 matches any favourite contact or the telephone number 0123456789
• CG:*Family*/CG:Business matches any contact in the contact groups Family Members, My Family or Business

Regular Expression Matching

Where's It Used ?

• in the If condition of an action, when the ~R or !~R operators are specified.
• in the Variable Search Replace action
• in the condition of a Variable Value state
• wherever a Simple Match is possible, by preceding the regex with ~R or !~R

Matching Rules