1. Advanced Regular ExpressionsOr
What’s special about
RegEx in MX
CFUNITED – The premier ColdFusion conference

2. Your Presenter Michael Dinowitz Head of House of Fusion
Publisher of Fusion Authority
Founding member of Team Macromedia
Doing this since June 95
Called on for the black magic code
June 28th – July 1st 2006

3. Disclaimer & Introduction
If you don’t know the basics – get out
No real changes from CF 5 or CFMX 6
June 28th – July 1st 2006

4. Basic additions Greedy vs. Lazy Nested sub expressions
+ is one or more and as many as it can
+? Is one or more but only as many as it needs
++ Same as greedy but does not allow back references (not in CFMX)
Nested sub expressions
In order of execution from outside it
Then left to right
June 28th – July 1st 2006

5. Character Vs. Posix classes
Non-special characters become special
Uses a backslash (\) to specify being special
Shorter than posix classes
Harder to ‘read’ for newbies
June 28th – July 1st 2006

6. Basic Character Classes
\b – word boundary
Any jump from alphanumeric to non-alphanumeric
refindnocase('\bbig\b', 'big')
\B – any 2 of the same ‘types’ of characters
refindnocase('\B', 'big') = 2
June 28th – July 1st 2006

7. More Character Classes
\A - same as ^ (not combined with (?m)
\Z – same as $ (not combined with (?m)
\n – newline
\r – carriage return
\t – tab
\d – any digit ([0-9])
\D – any non digit ([^0-9])
June 28th – July 1st 2006

8. More Character Classes
\w - Any alphanumeric character ([[:alnum:]] )
\W - Any non-alphanumeric character ([^[:alnum:]] )
\s - Any whitespace character including tab, space, newline, carriage return, and form feed ([\t\n\r\f ])
\S – any non-whitespace character ([^ \t\n\r\f])
June 28th – July 1st 2006

9. Expression Modifiers At beginning of expression
(?i) Causes expression to be case insensitive (same as NoCase version)
(?m) Multi-line mode
^ and $ matches line, not entire string
Carriage return Chr(13) is ignored as new line
June 28th – July 1st 2006

10. Expression Modifiers (?x) ignores all white space
Also allows usage of ## for comments
## will comment to end of line
reFind("(?x) one ##first option
|two ##second option
|three\ point\ five ## note escaped spaces
", "three point five")
June 28th – July 1st 2006

11. Group Modifiers Affects only the group its in
Must be at beginning of group
(?##) comment
Must escape #
(?:) does not add group to return collection
(?=) Positive look ahead
(?!) negative look ahead
June 28th – July 1st 2006

12. Positive Lookahead Tests if the text in the parenthesis exists
Does not save the text into return collection
Does not ‘consume text’
<a(?=.+href).+?href="([^"]+).+?>
June 28th – July 1st 2006

13. Negative Lookahead Tests if the text in the parenthesis does not exist
Does not save the text into return collection
Does not ‘consume text’
(<a(?!.+?target) [^>]+>)
June 28th – July 1st 2006

14. Replace conversion Used in REReplace()/REReplaceNoCase()
Either converts the ‘next’ character or a specific section of characters
\u – converts next character to uppercase
\l – converts the next character to lowercase
\U…\E – converts block to uppercase
\L…\E – converts block to lowercase
June 28th – July 1st 2006

15. Not Supported Positive Lookbehinds Negative Lookbehinds Other features
All accessible through the Java RegEx engine
Massimo has a CFC pre-built to do this
June 28th – July 1st 2006

16. Resources Chapters in most CFMX books CF-RegEx mailing list
This presentation
Books:
Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Edition
Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes
Java Regular Expressions Taming the java Dot util Dot regex Engine
June 28th – July 1st 2006