Auto Form
Auto Form is a web form filler that can store your contact details so you can fill web forms in a few short clicks. You no longer have to re-type details like name, home and work address, phone numbers, email address, etc.
For security purposes, all form details are stored securely in encrypted files located on your local hard drive.
- Storing form details
- Filling form details
- Editing Form details
- Adding Field Names
- Specifying field names in regular expression
Storing form details
To setup Auto Form, you first need to enter your details in the Form manager. Different contact details are stored as unique fields, for example your "Title" and "First Name" are separate fields. To enter your details to the Form Filler, Click the Tools > Auto Form > Manage Details.
The Form Manager should now appear. Enter your personal (home) and work details then click OK.
Filling form details
To fill a form with your personal details, click Tools > Auto Form > Fill in (home) details from the menu. To fill a form with your work details, click Tools > Auto Form > Fill in (work) details from the menu.
Note:
Auto Form will only fill in your details if it recognises the form field on the web page. If a field isn’t recognised, you need to add a field manually.
Editing Form details
To update details stored in Auto Form Manager, select Tools > Auto Form > Manage Details.
Adding Field Names
If you need Auto-Form to fill a field that is not listed in the form manager then you can define your own Custom Field. Custom fields are defined by you in the Customize tab of the form manager (the rightmost tab).
To add a field name:
- To open the form manager click Tools > Auto Form > Manage Details.
- Click the New button at the bottom of the screen. The cursor will move to the description box in the "field properties" box to the right
- When field description has been completed, you can add another field or click OK to close the form manager
Note:
For each custom field you define field properties. The properties consist of:
- Description: your description for the field
- Name: the field name identified in a HTML form
- Value: the information Auto-Form puts into a form for this field
Example
Some forms may ask for your "full name" in one field, rather than "first name" and "last name" in separate fields. To add the "Full Name" field, click New and enter the following in the properties box:
- Description: Full Name
- Name: fname (in this case, fname is the field name in the HTML form we want Auto-Form to fill)
- Value: Joe Bloggs
Click OK, and use Auto-Form to fill the "Full Name" field next time.
Specifying field names in regular expression
Deepnet Explorer allows advanced users to use regular expression when defining field names. A regular expression (RE) is a mechanism for describing patterns in text when setting up field names. An RE is made up of ordinary characters, some of which take on the special meanings described below.
Ordinary Characters
An ordinary character is an RE that matches itself. It can be any character, except
Hex Characters
Any character can be represented by its hex value. This is specified with the pattern \xdd, where dd is any 2-digit hexadecimal number, excluding zero.
Tabs
A tab character is represented by the pattern \t.
Page Breaks
A page break (form feed) character is represented by the pattern \f.
Line Breaks
A line break is represented by the pattern \n. This matches carriage return and line feed characters. Note that these cannot be combined with repetition operators (see below), so you can only match an exact number of them (e.g. \n\n will match a single blank line.) Do not use this for constraining matches to the end of a line, as it's much more efficient to use "$" (see Expression Anchoring below). This pattern should only be used to match text that spans line boundaries.
Special Characters
These special characters, can be rendered ordinary by preceding them with a backslash (\), if they are single special characters, or removing the preceding backslash if they are compound special characters.
| Character | Context |
| . [ \ | The period, left square bracket, and backslash are special except when used in a Class Expression. |
| * ? + | Asterisk, question mark and plus are special except when used in a class expression, as the first character of an RE, or as the first character of a Tagged Expression. |
| - | The hyphen is special in a Class Expression, except as the first or last character of that expression. |
| ^ | The circumflex is special when used as the first character of an entire RE (see Expression Anchoring), or as the first character of a Class Expression. |
| $ | The dollar sign is special when used as the last character of an entire RE (see Expression Anchoring). |
Wildcard Character
The period (.), when used outside of a class expression, matches any character except newline.
Repetition Operators
The asterisk (*) matches zero or more occurrences of the smallest possible preceding regular expression, while the question mark (?) matches zero or one, and the plus sign (+) matches at least one occurrence. For example, A*b+ matches zero or more A's followed by one or more b's.
Interval Operator
Repeats the smallest possible preceding regular expression the given number of times. The options are:
| \{count\} | Matches exactly count times. |
| \{min,\} | Matches at least min times. |
| \{min,max\} | Matches between min and max times. |
Alternation Operator
The alternation operator (\|) matches either the expression to its left or the one to its right. It has a lower precedence of any other regular expression operator, so the surrounding RE's must be bracketed with \(...\) if only a part of them is to be matched.
Class Expressions
A class expression is a RE, enclosed in square brackets ([...]), that matches any one of the elements contained in the brackets. The permitted elements of a class expression are:
Simple Characters
These are single characters that match themselves. To match a right square bracket (]), it must be the first character of the class expression, after any initial circumflex (see Negated Class Expressions). To match a hyphen, it must be either the first or the last character of the class expression. For example [AaBb] matches upper or lower case A or B.
Negated Class Expressions
If the first character of a class expression is the circumflex (^), the expression matches any character not in the class. For example [^AB^] matches any character except A, B and the circumflex itself.
Range Expressions
A range expression is two characters separated by a hyphen (-). It matches any characters with code points between those of the two characters. For example, [A-Za-z0-9-] matches any upper or lower case letter or digit, or the hyphen itself. Note that [a-z] also matches upper case letters, unless the option to match case is selected.
Character Class Operators
These can be used as an alternative way of representing classes of characters. For example, [a-z] is equivalent to [[:lower:]] and [a-z0-9] is equivalent to [[:lower:][:digit:]]. (Note the extra pairs of brackets.) The defined classes are:
| Expression | Description |
| [:alpha:] | Any letter. |
| [:lower:] | Any lower case letter. |
| [:upper:] | Any upper case letter. |
| [:alnum:] | Any digit or letter. |
| [:digit:] | Any digit. |
| [:xdigit:] | Any hexadecimal digit (0-9, a-f or A-F). |
| [:blank:] | Space or tab. |
| [:space:] | Space, tab, vertical tab or form feed. |
| [:cntrl:] | Control characters (Delete and ASCII codes less than space). |
| [:print:] | Printable characters, including space. |
| [:graph:] | Printable characters, excluding space. |
| [:punct:] | Anything that is not a control or alphanumeric character. |
| [:word:] | Letters, hypens and apostrophes. |
| [:token:] | Any of the characters defined on the Syntax page for the document class, or in the syntax definition file if syntax highlighting is enabled for the document class. |
Expression Anchoring
An RE can be restricted to matching strings that begin or end a line or word, as follows:
| ^ | A circumflex as the first character of an RE anchors the expression to the beginning of the line. |
| $ | A dollar sign as the last character of an RE anchors the expression to the end of the line. |
| \< | The character pair \< anchors the next RE to the start of a word. |
| \> | The character pair \> anchors the previous RE to the end of a word. |
Tagged Expressions
A tagged expression is an RE that starts with the pair \( and ends with the pair \). There can be up to nine such expressions in a complete RE. Such an expression matches the same as the expression without the surrounding \( and \). The first expression defined in this way can be referenced as \1 later in the RE, and so on up to \9 for the ninth tagged expression. Each such reference matches the same string as its original tagged expression. For example \(tu\) \1 matches the string "tu tu"