Useful Regular Expressions
Now that you have a better idea of how regular expressions work, let’s take a look at how you can actually use them in your own ColdFusion applications. Here are some regular expressions that perform common search-and-replace tasks:
Replace all characters in a string that aren’t numbers, letters, or underscores with an underscore:
<cfset NewString = REReplaceNoCase("This is a test", "\W", "_", "All")>Replace all spaces in a filename with the underscore character; this is useful in situations where you allow users to upload files to your ColdFusion server via their web browsers:
<cfset NewFilename = REReplace("My File Name.txt", " ", "_", "All")>Return the full directory path from a string containing a full path including filename:
<cfset TheDirectory = REReplaceNoCase(MyPath, "\w+\.\w+", "", "All")>
Return the filename from a string containing a full path including filename:
<cfset TheFileName = REReplaceNoCase(MyPath, "([A-Z]:\\)|\w+\\+", "", "All")>
Remove all doubled words in a string:
<cfset NoRepeats = REReplaceNoCase("I want to to go to the park.", "\b([a-z]+)[ ]+\1","\1","All")>Strip all HTML tags from a string; this is useful for removing HTML from form-field submissions:
<cfset NoHTML = REReplace(MyString, "<[^>]*>", "", "All")>
Remove all HTML anchors in a string, leaving just the text, if any:
<cfset NoHTMLLinks = REReplaceNoCase(MyString, "<a [^>]*>([[:print:]]*)</a>","\1",'All')>
Format all email addresses in a string as HTML
mailto:links. Note ...