Irule to External Data Group not pulling up second data field

so what i was missing, which was pointed out here was the fact that the F5 was unable to pull out the second part of the data. encapsulating the data in Double Quotes enabled that to work

Great that it works, but that most likely was not the reason. You changed your class command:

set goto [class match -value [string tolower [HTTP::host][HTTP::path]] starts_with www_ou_edu_redir_class]

which gave you a little more depth in the search. For example, if your incoming host was

ags.ou.edu

and there was no specified URI, which made "/" the default path, then your search string would have been

ags.ou.edu/

If then you're doing an EXACT match with the [class lookup ] command, feeding it this pattern, but you only have the following in the data group

ags.ou.edu

then it would never match, as you witnessed. If you then switch to a [class match -value $pattern starts_with datagroup] search, your more generic data group entry matches because the input "ags.ou.edu/" does indeed start with "ags.ou.edu".

The data group entries themselves don't need to be encapsulated in double quotes.