Field specifications can be literal field names, regular expressions or patterns. Leading and trailing blanks are stripped from the user supplied field specifications as well as from the entries of the NAME and field codes before being used for matching.
Since none of the following characters are used as part of the FIELD selection expressions, they can also be used as part of field names: ”;”, ”$”, ”%”, ”!”, ”@”, and ”#”7 .
Fields for which the entry in the NAME column of the the FIELD sub-table match the literal field name/regular expression/pattern are selected. If a field name/regular expression/pattern fails to match any field name, the given name/regular expression/pattern are matched against the field code. If still no field is selected, an exception of type MSSelectionFieldParseError is thrown.
Field specifications can also be give by their integer IDs. IDs can be a single ID or a range (section 1.2) of IDs (N0~N1). Field ID selection can also be done using a boolean expression. For a field specification of the form ”>ID”, all field IDs greater than ID are selected. Similarly for ”<ID” all field IDs smaller than ID are selected.
The field selection expression is a comma-separated list of field specifications. E.g.