User Guide

Regular expression examples 157
The following figure shows the output of the cfdump tag:
Thus, the length of the string found by the regular expression is 10, corresponding to the string
"<b>one</b>".
Regular expression examples
The following examples show some regular expressions and describe what they match:
Regular expressions in CFML
The following examples of CFML show some common uses of regular expression functions:
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.
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]*",
"$***.**")", "")
The string value of the variable Report
with all positive numbers in the dollar
format changed to "$***.**".