Regular expression examples
The following examples show some regular expressions and describe what they match:
|
Expression |
Description |
|---|---|
| [\?&]value= |
A URL parameter value in a URL. |
| [A-Z]:(\\[A-Z0-9_]+)+ |
An uppercase DOS/Windows path in which (a) is not the root of a drive, and (b) has only letters, numbers, and underscores in its text. |
| ^[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]* |
A ColdFusion variable with no qualifier. |
| ([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]*)(\.[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]*)? |
A ColdFusion variable with no more than one qualifier; for example, Form.VarName, but not Form.Image.VarName. |
| (\+|-)?[1-9][0-9]* |
An integer that does not begin with a zero and has an optional sign. |
| (\+|-)?[0-9]+(\.[0-9]*)? |
A real number. |
| (\+|-)?[1-9]\.[0-9]*E(\+|-)?[0-9]+ |
A real number in engineering notation. |
|
a{2,4} |
Two to four occurrences of "a": aa, aaa, aaaa. |
|
(ba){3,} |
At least three "ba" pairs: bababa, babababa, and so on. |
Regular expressions in CFML
The following examples of CFML show some common uses of regular expression functions:
|
Expression |
Returns |
|---|---|
| REReplace (CGI.Query_String, "CFID=[0-9]+[&]*", "") |
The query string with parameter CFID and its numeric value stripped out. |
| REReplace("I Love Jellies", "[[:lower:]]","x","ALL" |
I Lxxx Jxxxxxx |
| REReplaceNoCase("cabaret","[A-Z]", "G","ALL") |
GGGGGGG |
| REReplace (Report,"\$[0-9,]*\.[0-9]*","$***.**")", "") |
The string value of the variable Report with all positive numbers in the dollar format changed to "$***.**". |
| REFind ("[Uu]\.?[Ss]\.?[Aa}\.?", Report ) |
The position in the variable Report of the first occurrence of the abbreviation USA. The letters can be in either case and the abbreviation can have a period after any letter. |
| REFindNoCase("a+c","ABCAACCDD") |
4 |
| REReplace("There is is coffee in the the kitchen","([A-Za-z]+)[ ]+\1","*","ALL") |
There * coffee in * kitchen |
| REReplace(report, "<[^>]*>", "", "All") |
Removes all HTML tags from a string value of the report variable. |