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Tools
This section explains how to use additional tools provided with HCL AppScan Standard.
PowerTools
AppScan offers access to five utilities (PowerTools), each providing a specific feature to help you manage your application security or to help you use AppScan.
Authentication Tester
The Authentication Tester PowerTool is a testing utility that uses the "brute-force" technique to reveal weak username-password combinations that could be used to gain access to your web application. (A brute force attack is an automated process of trial and error used to guess authentication credentials, causing a server to acknowledge an imposter as a legitimate user.)
Form authentication
About metacharacters

Tools
This section explains how to use additional tools provided with HCL AppScan Standard.
- Options dialog box
  This section describes options you can control, to customize AppScan, from the Options dialog box (Tools > Options).
- Web Services Wizard extension
  This extension lets you scan using Open API description files. It is available from Tools > Extensions > Web Services Wizard (Open API), and the extension is enabled by default.
- Scan Scheduler
- User-Defined Tests
- PowerTools
  AppScan offers access to five utilities (PowerTools), each providing a specific feature to help you manage your application security or to help you use AppScan.
  - Authentication Tester
    The Authentication Tester PowerTool is a testing utility that uses the "brute-force" technique to reveal weak username-password combinations that could be used to gain access to your web application. (A brute force attack is an automated process of trial and error used to guess authentication credentials, causing a server to acknowledge an imposter as a legitimate user.)
  - Connection Test
    The Connection Test PowerTool enables you to ping web sites without using the Ping protocol, which is blocked by many firewalls.
  - Encode/Decode
    The Encode/Decode PowerTool encodes and decodes strings you put into it, to and from the format of your choice.
  - Expression Test
    Writing precise regular expressions can be a tedious trial-and-error process. You can use the Expression Test PowerTool to help accelerate the process.
  - HTTP Request Editor
    The HTTP Request Editor PowerTool enables you to send a fully-controlled HTTP request to your site, to test how your site responds to different kinds of HTTP request.
- Customizing the Tools menu
- Extensions
- Logs
  Logs can help you troubleshooting.
- Searching Results
  You can filter the Result List in any of the views, for specific data.

About metacharacters

A metacharacter is one or more characters with a special, non-literal meaning in the context of a regular expression. For example, the circumflex character (^) is a metacharacter that means "search at the beginning". If you want to find the circumflex character, rather than the metacharacter pattern, you must protect (or "escape") it with a backslash: \^.

The table following lists examples of some common regular expression metacharacters.


	Metacharacter Description	Example
\	Protect the next character (interpret it literally and not as a metacharacter).	`\!` finds an exclamation mark (`!`) \. finds a period (.), rather than a character
^	Find at the beginning of a string.	`^H` finds Home but not home or PHP
.	Find any character (letter, number, symbol, whitespace), except newline.	(.*) finds any paragraph
( )	Find a pattern group.	`(word)` finds "In this word" `^(Word)` finds "Words in this line" `Welcome ((back)\|(home))` finds "Welcome back" and "Welcome home"
[ ]	Find a pattern range.	`[a-z]` finds any lower-case alphabetic character
*	Find the pattern zero or more times.	`<(.*)>`finds all HTML tags, with their content
+	Find the pattern one or more times.	`(<.l>)+` finds <UL><OL>
?	Find the pattern zero or one time.	`log(.?)in` finds login and log in
(?i)	Find the next characters with a case-insensitive search.	`(?i)word` finds word, Word, woRd, WORD