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Regular expression examples

Last update:
May 18, 2026
The following examples show some regular expressions and describe what they match:
ExpressionDescription
[\?&]value=
A URL parameter value in a URL.
[A-Z]:(\\[A-Z0-9_]+)+
An uppercase DOS/Windows path in which (a) is not the root of a drive, and (b) has only letters, numbers, and underscores in its text.
^[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]*
A ColdFusion variable with no qualifier.
([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]*)(\.[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]*)?
A ColdFusion variable with no more than one qualifier; for example, Form.VarName, but not Form.Image.VarName.
(\+|-)?[1-9][0-9]*
An integer that does not begin with a zero and has an optional sign.
(\+|-)?[0-9]+(\.[0-9]*)?
A real number.
(\+|-)?[1-9]\.[0-9]*E(\+|-)?[0-9]+
A real number in engineering notation.
a{2,4}
Two to four occurrences of “a”: aa, aaa, aaaa.
(ba){3,}
At least three “ba” pairs: bababa, babababa, and so on.

Regular expressions in CFML

The following examples of CFML show some common uses of regular expression functions:
ExpressionReturns
REReplace (CGI.Query_String, "CFID=[0-9]+[&]*", "")
The query string with parameter CFID and its numeric value stripped out.
REReplace("I Love Jellies", "[[:lower:]]","x","ALL"
I Lxxx Jxxxxxx
REReplaceNoCase("cabaret","[A-Z]", "G","ALL")
GGGGGGG
REReplace (Report,"\$[0-9,]*\.[0-9]*","$***.**")", "")
The string value of the variable Report with all positive numbers in the dollar format changed to "$***.**".
REFind ("[Uu]\.?[Ss]\.?[Aa}\.?", Report )
The position in the variable Report of the first occurrence of the abbreviation USA. The letters can be in either case and the abbreviation can have a period after any letter.
REFindNoCase("a+c","ABCAACCDD")
4
REReplace("There is is coffee in the the kitchen","([A-Za-z]+)[ ]+\1","*","ALL")
There * coffee in * kitchen
REReplace(report, "<[^>]*>", "", "All")
Removes all HTML tags from a string value of the report variable.
The string value of the variable Report with all positive numbers in the dollar format changed to "$***.**".

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