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:

  • If the caret (^) is at the beginning of a (sub)expression, the matched string must be at the beginning of the string being searched.
  • If the dollar sign ($) is at the end of a (sub)expression, the matched string must be at the 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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