pf » Tag: regex on Pete Freitag's Blog

With the addition of a dozen new type values for the cfparam tag in ColdFusion 7, it has become a handy tool for validation.

I have a little trick for those of you who are using earlier versions of ColdFusion that don't support the new types for validation.

Shaun Innman posted about a technique he call's Widon't, for dealing with the widow problem on the web.

The widow problem is when you have a single word on a line by itself, at the end of a headline or paragraph. In typesetting this word is called a widow.

Brian Crescimanno recently published a form usability checklist on A List Apart. It's a great article that hits home some of my form pet peeves.

Thinking and Making has a good article called: Friendly URLs improve usability and user experience. I've always been a big fan of the friendly urls, when I see a site that uses friendly URL's I get a sense of elegance, and cleanliness.

Lets face it, unless you have a photographic memory, no developer can remember all the different functions, options, tags, etc. that exist. Documentation can be cumbersome at times, thats why I like cheat sheets.

To avoid comment spam, my blog comments are displayed as plain text. However urls to other entries on my blog are often posted to in the comments. So I wrote a simple regular expression to create hyperlinks out of them:

REReplaceNoCase(comments.comment,

"(http://www\.

I'm working on a function to strip HTML, but preserve things like paragraph spacing. In removing HTML tags, sometimes you end up with lots of blank lines...

I noticed today that the regular expression functions in CF support the newline character \n Chr(10), carriage return \r Chr(13), and tab \t Chr(9).

I wrote a simple function today that grabs a url, and parses out the title of the page from the url:

I was telling my girlfriend that I was working with regular expressions yesterday, and she said: Regular Expressions... sounds like a division of Hallmark. She of course is not a programmer, and she cracks me up with these sort of comments all the time.

I am porting some code from .NET to Java today, and found out about a very cool feature in regular expressions called Named Groups. Most regular expression implementations let you group text (which can then be used for back-references) using parenthesis, for example: my name is (pete).

Regular Expressions are a powerful tool for both developers and computer users alike. Regular Expressions were originally developed on Unix systems and used in programs like Perl, sed, and grep.