Exclusion filters not working

I've used SmartFTP's exclusion filters in the past with success. Just now I tried using some and they appear to have no effect. The simple example that I am down to now is this filter (just this one is setup right now):
.*pdf.*

With that filter in place I can upload or download a file named "airport_shuttle.pdf".

This really seems like a bug, but I want to make sure I'm not making some mistake.

Add *.pdf to the "Exclusion Filter" list.

Thanks for your reply, but you may have missed my point.

A) As a regular expression (which is what I'm trying to use), *.pdf is a completely different pattern, and I'm wondering if you realize what it means

B) The exclusion filters are not working here

I did try your pattern, and it does prevent the file I named earlier from being transferred, but that doesn't explain why the pattern I posted doesn't work, and that's what I need -- the advertised regular expression pattern matching in exclusion filters. As I said, I want to find out if I am doing something wrong. Otherwise, this looks like a bug problem, which I'll report appropriately.

If you understand regular expressions, would you please try the pattern I posted and see if that works?

They indeed seem to be broken, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

But in the mean time, simple Simple Regexp (DOS) equivalent is working.

So for the time being, you can use *.pdf or *.pdf* till a fix is available.

Thanks for looking into it.

Thanks also for your suggested workaround, but it's not going to be practical for me. To tell you the truth, I think the the filtering could be setup much better in SmartFTP. As it currently is (assuming it was working), I would have done something like
.*.(gif|jpg|pdf|mdb|css|js)$

and it wouldn't have been too much of a hassle, but to do it with the simple style like you suggested would be way too much of a hassle.

I'm now having some troubles using regexp, too. First of all, when clicking on the blue "Regular Expressions" link in the "Exclusion Filter" settings page, nothing happens. I realized that even a simple F1 (or selecting Help -> Contents) doesn't bring up the help, because there simply seems to be none (no *.hlp or *.chm file in SmartFTP's directory). I'm pretty sure I didn't delete it or anything like that.
To the problem: As the help doesn't work, I can't look up how regular expressions are supposed to be entered in the filter list. They for sure have to be escaped in some way, because otherwise SmartFTP wouldn't know whether e.g. "test.aaa" is a simple DOS regexp or a "normal" (Perl-like) regexp. I tried using the common "/test.aaa/" to denote a Perl regexp, but it didn't work.

Any help links that I've ever seen in Smart FTP have been links to web pages, not built in help. I don't believe the regular expressions in Smart FTP require delimiters. But then again, they don't (or at least didn't) work anyway, so that's kind of beside the point.

The regexp work for me. Clicking on the link in the dialog page should bring up this page:
https://www.smartftp.com/support/kb/128

Regards,
-Mat

Okay, my fault, I missed to escape a "[" in order to make regexp work. But two questions remain:

1) How does SmartFTP decide whether the filter string "test.aaa" is a simple DOS regexp, meaning to skip a file named "test" with extension "aaa", or a Perl regexp, meaning to skip a file that contains "test" followed by any character, followed by "aaa"?

2) Why do the blue links in the settings dialogs not work for me (neither does the help)? I have IE, MyIE2, Firefox and Opera as browsers installed. Opera is my default browser. I've already tried to set the default back to IE, but that changed nothing. I'd be happy to paste any registry keys you need in order to fix this.

>1
SmartFTP tries to compile it as a regular expression first. If it fails it will use wildcmp.

>2
I can send you the source code which allows you to debug it on your systme.

-Mat

SmartFTP tries to compile it as a regular expression first. If it fails it will use wildcmp.

Aha! Good to know. Maybe this should be written to the "Exclusion Filter" settings page, instead of just saying that regexp are supported. I didn't find any place where this is already mentioned.

I can send you the source code which allows you to debug it on your systme.

Yes, please. I also noticed some (but not all) programs having problems to launch an URL on my system. So it's not only SmartFTP.