
Contents > Developing ColdFusion MX Applications > Using Regular Expressions in Functions > Regular expression syntax > Using character classes

Using character classes

In character sets within regular expressions, you can include a character class. You enclose the character class inside square brackets, as the following example shows:

REReplace ("Macromedia Web Site","[[:space:]]","*","ALL")

This code replaces all the spaces with *, producing this string:

Macromedia*Web*Site

You can combine character classes with other expressions within a character set. For example, the regular expression [[:space:]123] searches for a space, 1, 2, or 3. The following example also uses a character class in a regular expression:

<cfset IndexOfOccurrence=REFind("[[:space:]][A-Z]+[[:space:]]", 
   "Some BIG string")>
<!--- The value of IndexOfOccurrence is 5 --->

The following table shows the character classes that ColdFusion supports. Regular expressions using these classes match any Unicode character in the class, not just ASCII or ISO-8859 characters..

Character class

Matches

:alpha:

Any alphabetic character.

:upper:

Any uppercase alphabetic character.

:lower:

Any lowercase alphabetic character

:digit:

Any digit. Same as \d.

:alnum:

Any alphanumeric character. Same as \w.

:xdigit:

Any hexadecimal digit. Same as [0-9A-Fa-f].

:blank:

Space or a tab.

:space:

Any whitespace character. Same as \s.

:print:

Any alphanumeric, punctuation, or space character.

:punct:

Any punctuation character

:graph:

Any alphanumeric or punctuation character.

:cntrl:

Any character not part of the character classes [:upper:], [:lower:], [:alpha:], [:digit:], [:punct:], [:graph:], [:print:], or [:xdigit:].

:word:

Any alphanumeric character, plus the underscore (_)

ascii

The ASCII characters, in the Hexadecimal range 0 - 7F

Character class	Matches
:alpha:	Any alphabetic character.
:upper:	Any uppercase alphabetic character.
:lower:	Any lowercase alphabetic character
:digit:	Any digit. Same as \d.
:alnum:	Any alphanumeric character. Same as \w.
:xdigit:	Any hexadecimal digit. Same as [0-9A-Fa-f].
:blank:	Space or a tab.
:space:	Any whitespace character. Same as \s.
:print:	Any alphanumeric, punctuation, or space character.
:punct:	Any punctuation character
:graph:	Any alphanumeric or punctuation character.
:cntrl:	Any character not part of the character classes [:upper:], [:lower:], [:alpha:], [:digit:], [:punct:], [:graph:], [:print:], or [:xdigit:].
:word:	Any alphanumeric character, plus the underscore (_)
ascii	The ASCII characters, in the Hexadecimal range 0 - 7F


Contents > Developing ColdFusion MX Applications > Using Regular Expressions in Functions > Regular expression syntax > Using character classes

Version 6.1

Comments are no longer accepted for ColdFusion MX 6.1. ColdFusion 8 is the current version.

Comments

hokugawa said on Sep 30, 2003 at 8:44 AM :

missing colon for ascii. It should be :ascii:

profit11 said on Jul 15, 2004 at 7:39 PM :

The actual punctuation charcters that fall under :punct: used to be listed (see http://livedocs.macromedia.com/coldfusion/5.0/Using_ColdFusion_Studio/language5.htm). Now they're not.

Adam Cameron said on Dec 27, 2004 at 7:10 PM :

\w is actually equivalent to :word: not :alnum:. The difference being that \w matches underscore (like :word: does), whereas :alnum: only matches alphanumeric values.

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