Outdated operators

[Pascal van Dooren]

Hi,

With the introduction of the new Google Ads Scripts Experience some of the old operators have been sunset ("CONTAINS_IGNORE_CASE"). Using them will result in an error:

unrecognized operator "CONTAINS_IGNORE_CASE"

Instead we can now use the LIKE and REGEXP_MATCH operators for strings. However, these don't seem to be able to achieve the same goal. LIKE is case sensitive and I can't seem to get REGEXP_MATCH working with the case insensitive flag.

Could you please update the Google Ads Scripts documentation as they still refer to the old operators. Also I'd like to know how to select entities based on case-insensitive strings in the new experience.

Thanks in advance.

[Pascal van Dooren]

Never mind, it seems LIKE does use case-insensitive matching. However, it would still be nice if the documentation was updated to reflect these changes.

[Sigurd Fabrin]

"can't seem to get REGEXP_MATCH working with the case insensitive flag"

Try (?i) - like this:

let campaignPattern = 'Part of Campaign Name in Whatever CasE';
    let query =
        'SELECT '+
        'campaign.name '+
        'FROM campaign '+
        'WHERE '+
        'campaign.name REGEXP_MATCH "(?i).*'+campaignPattern+'.*"';
    let response = AdsApp.search(query);
    while (response.hasNext()) {
      let row = response.next();
      console.log(row.campaign.name)
    }

GAQL regex syntax: https://github.com/google/re2/wiki/Syntax & https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/query/grammar

Sigurd

[Pascal van Dooren]

Thanks Sigurd! I found the documentation on how to use the flags quite unclear, but your solution fixes my problem.

[Google Ads Scripts Forum Advisor]

Hello,

@Sigurd, thank you for clarifying the documentation. 

Please let us know if there are any further questions.

Regards,

Matt Google Ads Scripts Team

ref:_00D1U1174p._5004Q2fnPaY:ref

[Pascal van Dooren]

It seems there are still some issues with REGEXP_MATCH. I'd like to match campaigns with this pattern: (E). However, this does not seem to work, despite escaping the parentheses:

.*\(E\).*

I suppose there's some bug in the regex matching?

[Sigurd Fabrin]

This should work: (.*)([(][E][)])(.*)

Explanation from: https://regex101.com/

Sigurd

[Pascal van Dooren]

Thanks a lot Sigurd. That seems to do the trick.

Another question. I'd like to match campaigns with a specific naming using the (NOT) LIKE operator. For example campaigns that contain '_DSA'. However, when I use the filter 'LIKE "%_DSA%"' it will treat the underscore as a wildcard. Using a backslash to escape the underscore will result in an error. I can't find anything about escaping for GAQL. Could you perhaps point me in the right direction again?

[Sigurd Fabrin]

Yes, '_' is a wildcard. 

It seems GAQL doesn't support use of the ESCAPE keyword - where you'd define what character you use for escaping.

However, you can use wildcards as literals if you enclose them in brackets

Try this to match any campaign with this pattern"_DSA" using LIKE 

 - btw: note that LIKE is case insensitive in GAQL

'SELECT '+
      'campaign.name '+

 'FROM '+
      'campaign '+
 'WHERE +
      'campaign.name LIKE "%[_]dsa%"' // This works
   // 'campaign.name LIKE "%$_dsa%" ESCAPE "$"' // This doesn't work

Sigurd

[Pascal van Dooren]

Thank you very much Sigurd, you've helped me out once again.