Adobe ColdFusion 8

Using character classes

In character sets within regular expressions, you can include a character class. You enclose the character class inside square brackets, as the following example shows:

REReplace ("Adobe Web Site","[[:space:]]","*","ALL")

This code replaces all the spaces with *, producing this string:

Adobe*Web*Site

You can combine character classes with other expressions within a character set. For example, the regular expression [[:space:]123] searches for a space, 1, 2, or 3. The following example also uses a character class in a regular expression: 

<cfset IndexOfOccurrence=REFind("[[:space:]][A-Z]+[[:space:]]", 
    "Some BIG string")>
<!--- The value of IndexOfOccurrence is 5 --->

The following table shows the character classes that ColdFusion supports. Regular expressions using these classes match any Unicode character in the class, not just ASCII or ISO-8859 characters.

Character class

Matches

:alpha:

Any alphabetic character.

:upper:

Any uppercase alphabetic character.

:lower:

Any lowercase alphabetic character

:digit:

Any digit. Same as \d.

:alnum:

Any alphanumeric character. Same as \w.

:xdigit:

Any hexadecimal digit. Same as [0-9A-Fa-f].

:blank:

Space or a tab.

:space:

Any whitespace character. Same as \s.

:print:

Any alphanumeric, punctuation, or space character.

:punct:

Any punctuation character

:graph:

Any alphanumeric or punctuation character.

:cntrl:

Any character not part of the character classes [:upper:], [:lower:], [:alpha:], [:digit:], [:punct:], [:graph:], [:print:], or [:xdigit:].

:word:

Any alphanumeric character, plus the underscore (_)

:ascii:

The ASCII characters, in the Hexadecimal range 0 - 7F