In some cases, the value of a key in the MaxScale configuration file is a regular expression. As such, every character of the value is significant.

Currently, it is quite error prone as there is no specific starting and terminating character (e.g. quote) for the regular expression. For instance, in the following

match= *from *users

the space after the equal sign is significant and as will any trailing spaces be, however invisible they might be.

To reduce the risk for confusion there should be a specific regex type that requires the regex string to be enclosed in some specific character. E.g.

match=" *from *users "

Note that whatever the quote character is there must be a way for escaping it to allow its use in the regex itself, or then the requirement must simply be that the first non whitespace character after the equal sign and the last character of the line must be the quote character, which are then simply ignored.