Regular expression syntax

[community_help]

This question was posted in response to the following article: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/Developing/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec0a38f-7ffb.html

[molaro]

Shouldn't this return 6? It is returning 1 for me. Is this broken or am I doing something incorrectly?? Changing this to reMatchNoCase returns an array of each lowercase letter, so that is why it returns 1, but I think that is a bug.

foo = "this Test";

writeDump(reFindNoCase("[[:upper:]]",foo));

[molaro]

DUH, reFindnocase is going to find letters and ignore case! Copy/paste foils me again! Sorry!!

[Guest]

How would you negate specific characters then? In my cftextarea I don't want to allow single or double quotes. In the cftextarea tag I set validate="regular_expression" pattern="(^[\'\&\*\#\"]*$)" but I get an error because CF thinks I'm closing the pattern parameter before the closing ] bracket. I've tried to pass pattern as a literal by using single quotes instead and that didn't work either.

A workaround example would be greatly appreciated.

[WolfShade]

I don't know about CF RegEx, but I think in JavaScript RegEx, certain characters within [ and ] don't need to be escaped.

^_^

[Guest]

Thanks WolfShade. I think I'm going to try a different approach and sanitize the field on the submit page and strip the quotes.

[JMF3]

First, be sure to have validate="regex" so that the tag runs your pattern, then try:

pattern="[^'\&##""\*]"

That should exclude what you're trying to exclude.

For instance, if you try <cfoutput>#reReplace("Test me withou't any quotes.", "['\&##""\*]", "", "all")#</cfoutput>, you'll get:

Test me without any quotes.

So that pattern should work (just with the addition of the ^ at the beginning, since in the textarea you're trying to validate that you've got anything BUT those characters, as far as I can tell.

[Guest]

JMF,

Thanks a million! I actually ended up figuring something similar. I let the form accept any character (because the email that sends info still renders those characters fine). The submission page though also writes the data to XML and submits to another application hence needing to strip the quotes (otherwise it blows up). So I just set this at the top of the submission page:

<cfset description = "#REReplace(FORM.description,"[^0-9A-Za-z\s \\\/\(\)\%\@\$\!]","","all")#">

Though I believe your solution looks a lot more elegant.