Column Name Conditions

A Column Name condition matches a column’s name against a pattern, useful when the name itself is a reliable indicator of what the column holds, such as ssn, email, or card_number.

This condition never accesses row data: it evaluates the column name string directly, so a match is either true or false for a given column, not a percentage of sampled values (a sampled subset other conditions evaluate; see Sampling).

Fields

• Pattern — an RE2 regular expression or literal string, depending on the comparator.
• Comparator — see Classifier Rules: Comparators for the shared pattern-matching options and RE2 case-sensitivity behavior.

Example

This condition matches a column whose name contains any of several SSN-related terms, case-insensitively:

{ "target": "METADATA", "comparator": "matches", "pattern": "(?i)ssn|social_security|ss_num" }

Behavior

In Match Confidence scoring, a Column Name match is outranked by a Regex match, but outranks a Data Location, Data Length, or Column Size match on the same column.

Availability

Column Name conditions evaluate on every classification job, with no gating by data source or processing location. See Classification Processing Location for the full picture.