Adobe 38043740 - ColdFusion Standard - Mac Development Manual page 759

DEVELOPING COLDFUSION 9 APPLICATIONS
Requesting and Presenting Information
Multicharacter regular expressions
Use the following rules to build a multicharacter regular expression:
• Parentheses group parts of regular expressions into a subexpression that can be treated as a single unit. For example,
"(ha)+" matches one or more instances of ha.
• A one-character regular expression or grouped subexpression followed by an asterisk (*) matches zero or more
occurrences of the regular expression. For example, "[a-z]*" matches zero or more lowercase characters.
• A one-character regular expression or grouped subexpression followed by a plus sign (+) matches one or more
occurrences of the regular expression. For example, "[a-z]+" matches one or more lowercase characters.
• A one-character regular expression or grouped subexpression followed by a question mark (?) matches zero or one
occurrence of the regular expression. For example, "xy?z" matches either xyz or xz.
• The carat (^) at the beginning of a regular expression matches the beginning of the field.
• The dollar sign ($) at the end of a regular expression matches the end of the field.
• The concatenation of regular expressions creates a regular expression that matches the corresponding
concatenation of strings. For example, "[A-Z][a-z]*" matches any capitalized word.
• The OR character (|) allows a choice between two regular expressions. For example, "jell(y|ies)" matches either jelly
or jellies.
• Curly brackets ({}) indicate a range of occurrences of a regular expression. You use them in the form "{m, n}" where
m is a positive integer equal to or greater than zero indicating the start of the range and n is equal to or greater than
m, indicating the end of the range. For example, "(ba){0,3}" matches up to three pairs of the expression ba. The form
"{m,}" requires at least m occurrences of the preceding regular expression. The form "{m}" requires exactly m
occurrences of the preceding regular expression. The form "{,n}" is not allowed.
Backreferences
Backreferencing lets you match text in previously matched sets of parentheses. A slash followed by a digit n (\n) refers
to the nth parenthesized subexpression.
One example of how you can use backreferencing is searching for doubled words; for example, to find instances of "the
the" or "is is" in text. The following example shows backreferencing in a regular expression:
(\b[A-Za-z]+)[ ]+\1
This code matches text that contains a word that is repeated twice; that is, it matches a word (specified by the \b word
boundary special character and the "[A-Za-z]+)" followed by one or more spaces (specified by "[ ]+"), followed by the
first matched subexpression, the first word, in parentheses. For example, it would match "is is", but not "This is".
Exact and partial matches
ColdFusion validation normally considers a value to be valid if any of it matches the regular expression pattern. If you
want to ensure that the entire entry matches the pattern, "anchor" it to the beginning and end of the field, as follows:
• If a caret (^) is at the beginning of a pattern, the field must begin with a string that matches the pattern.
• If a dollar sign ($) is at the end of a pattern, the field must end with a string that matches the pattern.
• If the expression starts with a caret and ends with a dollar sign, the field must exactly match the pattern.
Expression examples
The following examples show some regular expressions and describe what they match:
Last updated 1/20/2012
754