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Cirrus Regex pattern for ignoring blank lines with whitespaces

thamizh85 over 12 years ago

Our ASA config change reports are running too long since whenever we make changes through ASDM, it introduces several blank lines. Most often the entire configuration file is displayed as Config change, even though the changes were only on few lines.

The inbuilt regex for matching blank lines doesn't match this since there are up to 15 blank spaces in the in the empty lines whereas the regex just matches for line with no character.

I tried several regexes including the ones below but they are unable to ignore blank line with space.

^[ \t]+$

^\s+$

^[ \t][ \t]*$

^[\s]+$

But none of these seems to match. What would be the correct regex for ignoring blank lines with whitespaces? I am using NCM 6.0

0 njoylif over 12 years ago

try ^\s*$
also, this is a great tool to test regex (keep in mind it may not be exactly the same as how SW implements)
http://gskinner.com/RegExr/
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0 thamizh85 over 12 years ago in reply to njoylif

\s* will match zero or any number of occurences of White space and by definition it ignores all differences in the lines. In practice that is what I observed in the config change report as well.

The correct definition should be ^\s+$ but for some reason the white spaces are not matching against this regex. And that is why I am not sure what is the regex engine used by NCM, is there any peculiarities we need to take care?
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0 cvachovecj over 12 years ago in reply to thamizh85

Hi thamizh85,
I discussed the problem with our dev team and they ask you to open a support case, generate and send them session trace and e.g. two config files with the blank lines.
Regards,
Jiri
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0 danielleh over 12 years ago in reply to cvachovecj

Upon opening a support ticket, would you please post back here with your ticket # and keep us updated with your progress?
Thanks!
DH
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0 ElDeeBee over 12 years ago in reply to danielleh

The first thing you want to do for ASA's is set the correct template manually.
Right click on the ASA and edit the selected node.
On the right side window scroll down to the Communication section.
Next to the Device command template: change the auto determine to Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance.

See if using the correct template makes a difference.
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0 thamizh85 over 11 years ago in reply to ElDeeBee

I have set the template to Adaptive Security Appliance now, let me see if the subsequent config downloads don't have this issue. Any reason why you suspect this to be the problem?
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0 seigniory over 11 years ago

Love love love that you called it Cirrus, and not NPM up front. I prefer Cirrus, too. :-)
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0 thamizh85 over 11 years ago in reply to danielleh

Here is the case number: Case #337228
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0 netlogix over 11 years ago

Please keep us updated, I have been trying to figure it out too. I ended up just doing "no pager", but then someone turns it back on and I get a bunch of silly empty lines. I even checked the ascii code of the files to make sure they were spaces (20), not that they just look like spaces. I don't remember the order of crlf (10+13 or 13+10), but I think NCM should handle it either way.
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0 thamizh85 over 11 years ago in reply to netlogix

Yeah, it is because of the terminal paging. As recommended, if I use the correct Device template it should setup "term pager 0" automatically. I have set it up and waiting for some config change to confirm it works. You should also try to fix up the template since it has an option to execute the terminal pager command automatically before download.
But I am still curious to know how it can be fixed on the Regex also, since it might come handy for some other purposes.
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