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.

The string value of the variable Report with all positive numbers in the dollar format changed to "$***.**".

 Adobe

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