Wild Card Filtering in AutoCAD Electrical Reports

Posted July 25, 2007

by Nate Holt

You've marked all of the customer-supplied schematic components and existing equipment with a LOC code of "CUST." Now it's simple to get a quick report, say a BOM report of the customer-supplied items. You start the report, enter CUST in the "LOC" edit box, and hit OK.

If you want a report of all components that are not customer supplied, you have two choices. You can either enter into the LOC edit box all of the used location codes separated by commas or use the AutoCAD "tilde" wild card character and enter "~CUST" into the LOC edit box. This prefix means "not CUST." In other words, the report shows everything but with CUST items filtered out.

Here is a list of all of the AutoLisp-supported wild card characters (pulled from the normal Visual Lisp help):

Let's say you want a BOM report of all of the components in PNL2 and any operator station with an OPSTA2 location prefix. Enter this string into the LOC location edit box:

PNL2,OPSTA2*

Let's say that you mark some of the location codes with an embedded # character, like "PNL#4" or "MCC#1." Since the # character is a wild card character, you need to use the reverse quote character like this in order for the # character to be read "literally" instead of as a wild card character:

PNL`#4,MCC`#1

This gives you a report of all of the items in PNL#4 and MCC#1. Pretty neat.

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