Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Ralph Lange <[email protected]> · Thu, 08 Sep 2016 19:13:15 +0200

On September 8, 2016 6:45:31 PM GMT+02:00, "J. Lewis Muir" <[email protected]> wrote:
>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

Hi Lewis, 

Please remember that in EPICS context, record and PV are not the same. 

MyRecord.SCAN is a perfectly valid PV name, containing a dot. 

Chapter 6.4.11 in your AppDevGuide describes the record instance, and correctly mentions the allowed characters for record names. 

Cheers 
~Ralph 

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System