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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.
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.
Metacharacters
General information 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.
    - Using Expression Test
    - Text replacements
      Replacing text that matches a specific pattern.
    - Pattern groups
      Applying a regular expression to a group of characters or metacharacters.
    - Metacharacters
      General information about metacharacters.
  - 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.

Metacharacters

General information about metacharacters.

Any single character (letter, digit, or symbol) in a regular expression is matched to itself, literally; unless it is a metacharacter. A metacharacter is one or more characters that have a unique meaning and are not used literally in the regular expression match.

For example, the circumflex character (^) is a metacharacter that means "search at the beginning".

If you want to find the character, rather than the metacharacter pattern, put a backslash (\) before it.

For example, to find the circumflex as a text character, the regular expression must be: \^


Reg. Exp.	Description	Example
\	Find the next character as a character; do not use its metacharacter pattern.	`\.` finds a period (`.`) in the text `.` finds the first character (any character)
^	Find at the beginning of a string	`^1` finds "1. Click Save." but not: "in the 210th line"
.	Find any character (except newline).	Finds a, A, 1, <, ., =, and so on; whatever the first character is.
()	Find a pattern group.	`(word)` finds "In this word" `^(Word)` finds "Words in this line"
[]	Find a pattern range.	`[a-z]` finds letters, but not numbers
*	Find the previous pattern zero or more times.	`.` finds all characters `<(.)>` finds all HTML tags
+	Finds the previous pattern one or more times.	`(<.l>)+` finds <UL><OL>
?	Finds the previous pattern zero or one time.	`(<.l>)?` finds <UL>
(?i)	Find the next characters with a case-insensitive search.	`(?i)word` finds word and Word