Adobe 38043740 - ColdFusion Standard - Mac Development Manual page 141

DEVELOPING COLDFUSION 9 APPLICATIONS
The CFML Programming Language
Special Character Description
^ If the caret is at the beginning of a regular expression, the matched string must be at the beginning of the string
being searched.
For example, the regular expression "^ColdFusion" matches the string "ColdFusion lets you use regular
expressions" but not the string "In ColdFusion, you can use regular expressions."
$ If the dollar sign is at the end of a regular expression, the matched string must be at the end of the string being
searched.
For example, the regular expression "ColdFusion$" matches the string "I like ColdFusion" but not the string
"ColdFusion is fun."
? A character set or subexpression followed by a question mark matches zero or one occurrence of the character
set or subexpression.
For example, xy?z matches either "xyz" or "xz".
| The OR character allows a choice between two regular expressions.
For example, jell(y|ies) matches either "jelly" or "jellies".
+ A character set or subexpression followed by a plus sign matches one or more occurrences of the character set or
subexpression.
For example, [a-z]+ matches one or more lowercase characters.
* A character set or subexpression followed by an asterisk matches zero or more occurrences of the character set or
subexpression.
For example, [a-z]* matches zero or more lowercase characters.
() Parentheses group parts of a regular expression into subexpressions that you can treat as a single unit.
For example, (ha)+ matches one or more instances of "ha".
(?x) If at the beginning of a regular expression, it specifies to ignore whitespace in the regular expression and lets you
use ## for end-of-line comments. You can match a space by escaping it with a backslash.
For example, the following regular expression includes comments, preceded by ##, that are ignored by
ColdFusion:
reFind("(?x)
one ##first option
|two ##second option
|three\ point\ five ## note escaped spaces
", "three point five")
(?m) If at the beginning of a regular expression, it specifies the multiline mode for the special characters ^ and $.
When used with ^, the matched string can be at the start of the entire search string or at the start of new lines,
denoted by a linefeed character or chr(10), within the search string. For $, the matched string can be at the end
the search string or at the end of new lines.
Multiline mode does not recognize a carriage return, or chr(13), as a new line character.
The following example searches for the string "two" across multiple lines:
#reFind("(?m)^two", "one#chr(10)#two")#
This example returns 4 to indicate that it matched "two" after the chr(10) linefeed. Without (?m), the regular
expression would not match anything, because ^ only matches the start of the string.
The character (?m) does not affect \A or \Z, which always match the start or end of the string, respectively. For
information on \A and \Z, see "Using escape sequences" on page 137.
Last updated 1/20/2012
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