The Dopefly Tech Blog

Use the Java regular expression engine in ColdFusion

posted under category: ColdFusion on April 7, 2006 at 12:00 am by Nathan

This is somewhat old news, but I've been using it lately, and figured I'd put a little reminder out here. Whenever you are trying to create a regular expression in ColdFusion and are having trouble with it, or if you're trying to use an advanced feature that just doesn't work (like lookbehind), remember that there IS a solution.

Here's a hint. Remember, CF is Java! Here's how to exploit the wonders of java.lang.String:

<cfset str = "This is my string!">
#str.matches("^.+$")#, displays YES
#str.replaceAll("\W","")#, displays Thisismystring
<cfdump var="#str.split("\W")#"/>, dumps an array of words