Words, such as foo/... or
- ".*test rule" or
- //bar/baz:all.
- If a character sequence is "quoted" (begins and ends with a
- single-quote ', or begins and ends with a
- double-quote "), it is a word.
- If a character sequence is not quoted, it may still be parsed as a word.
- Unquoted words are sequences of characters drawn from
- the set of alphabet characters, numerals, slash /,
- hyphen -, underscore _, star *, and
- period .. Unquoted words may not start with a
- hyphen or period.
+ ".*test rule" or //bar/baz:all. If a
+ character sequence is "quoted" (begins and ends with a single-quote
+ ', or begins and ends with a double-quote
+ "), it is a word. If a character sequence is not
+ quoted, it may still be parsed as a word. Unquoted words are sequences
+ of characters drawn from the alphabet characters A-Za-z,
+ the numerals 0-9, and the punctuation _/.-@*$
+ (underscore, slash, period, hyphen, at sign, star, dollar sign).
+ Unquoted words may not start with a hyphen or period, even though
+ relative target names may start with
+ those characters. Unquoted words also may not include the characters
+ plus sign +, equals sign =, or tilde
+ ~, even though those characters are permitted in target
+ names. Thus, when writing code that generates query expressions, target
+ names should be quoted.
We chose this syntax so that quote marks aren't needed in most cases.