Hi,

when importing transactions with new payees, with some of the new payees an entry is created under the tap “Matching” including special characters.

e.g.: Payee > .*kissandfly.at Match: > ^\.\*kissandfly\.at$

Can anyone explain
• when/ why these entries are created with special charaters and
• the functionality/ meaning if these special characters?

KMM 5.0.6/ 5.1.1 stable on Windows 10 - 20H2

Thanks!

Not knowing exactly what you mean by special characters, I can envision you mean ^, $ and \ Their meaning is explained in the context of regular expressions. Here, the meaning of the leading ^ and trailing $ is to make sure that a comparison against it is an exact match of the expression in between. The backslash \ is an escape character which takes away the special meaning of the following character in a regular expression.

Here, each dot is preceded with a backslash so that a dot is matched and nothing else. Within a regular expression the dot otherwise has the meaning of "match any character at this location". The asterisk in regular expressions has the meaning of "match 0 ore more occurrences" of the preceding character. So ".*" would mean "match any number of characters" but "\.\*" means match the two characters ".*".

Besides the special characters explained here, there is a lot more characters with special meaning in regular expressions and their meaning differs slightly between the implementations.

The entries are created when a new payee is found during an import to match it the next time.

Hope that helps.

This very detailed explanation hit the spot.
Many thanks for your fast response!