User Guide

Chapter 14

Using Regular Expressions in

Functions

This chapter describes how regular expressions work in the following ColdFusion

functions:

• REFind

• REFindNoCase

• REReplace

• REReplaceNoCase

This chapter does not apply to regular expressions used in the cfinput and

cftextinput tags. These tags use JavaScript regular expressions, which have a

slightly different syntax than ColdFusion regular expressions.

For information on JavaScript regular expressions, see “Input Validation with cfform

Controls,” in Chapter 9. For detailed descriptions of the ColdFusion functions that

use regular expressions, see the CFML Reference.

Contents

• About Regular Expressions.....................................................................................260

• Basic Regular Expression Rules..............................................................................261

• Multicharacter Regular Expressions...................................................................... 263

• Using Backreferences..............................................................................................265

• Returning Matched Subexpressions......................................................................266

• Regular Expression Examples ................................................................................ 267