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Anchoring a Regular Expression to a String

All or part of a regular expression can be anchored to either the beginning or end of the string being searched:

Regular expression examples

The following examples show some regular expressions and describe what they match.

Regular Expression Examples 
Expression
Description
[\?&]value=
A URL parameter value in a URL.
[A-Z]:(\\[A-Z0-9_]+)+
An uppercase DOS/Windows full path that (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.
(\+|-)?[1-9][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, ...

Regular expressions in CFML

The following examples of CFML show some common uses of regular expression functions.

Examples of Regular Expression Functions 
Expression
Description
REReplace (CGI.Query_String, 
"CFID=[0-9]+[&]*", "")
Returns 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]*", "$***.**")", "")
Returns the string value of the variable Report with all positive numbers in the dollar format changed to "$***.**".
REFind ("[Uu]\.?[Ss]\.?[Aa}\.?", 
Report )
Finds the position of the first occurrence of the abbreviation USA in the variable Report.
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.


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