Pattern matching basics

After Job Analysis, many of the valuable pieces of information about a job are available in the form of character strings in read-only variables called DD Descriptors or Job Descriptors. These character strings are quite often variations on a pattern: for example, RACF userids tend to come in groups that begin with the same characters. You therefore need a technique to interrogate a character Descriptor to determine whether it matches a pattern.

In DAL and JAL, this technique takes the form of a pattern matching function which returns TRUE or FALSE values, depending on the success of matching the pattern.

This section provides information about the following: