Sometimes It's The Little Things: Working With Square Brackets in Encounter

Good news! A long-standing source of irritation for Encounter users has been addressed in our 8.1.USR1 release.  You might not have noticed it if you've grown accustomed to backslash-escaping square brackets in object names.

For example:
selectNet DTMF_INST/RESULTS_CONV_INST/nbus_544[0]

In 7.1, if you tried to select a net with this syntax you'd get the following as the TCL interpreter treated the contents within the square bracket as an executable command:
encounter 1> selectNet DTMF_INST/RESULTS_CONV_INST/nbus_544[0]
invalid command name "0"

As a workaround, you needed to either escape each square bracket -or- enclose the entire string within squiggly braces:
encounter 2> selectNet DTMF_INST/RESULTS_CONV_INST/nbus_544\[0\]
encounter 3> selectNet {DTMF_INST/RESULTS_CONV_INST/nbus_544[0]}

This was cumbersome to work with, especially for users who spend a lot of time querying the database and timing from the command line.  In 8.1.USR1 the tool has been enhanced to handle square brackets automatically without needing to escape them.  When the contents within square braces are anything other than an Encounter command, they're treated as bus bits.  The nice thing about the way this has been implemented, is that it applies to all commands in the system rather than on a command-by-command basis.

In other words, any of the following also work:
report_timing -through DTMF_INST/RESULTS_CONV_INST/nbus_544[0]
dbGet top.nets.name DTMF_INST/RESULTS_CONV_INST/nbus_544[0]
get_nets DTMF_INST/RESULTS_CONV_INST/nbus_544[0]

I hope this little enhancement is useful.

Question of the Day:
Is there something similar to this- a little thing that's bothering you about Encounter you'd like us to improve?  Let us know in the comments area and we'll see what we can do.

-Bob Dwyer