REFind and ReReplace support and

March 28, 2005 by Pete Freitag

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).

Note that you can use these special character matchers inside the find pattern of ReReplace but you cannot use them in the replace expression of ReReplace.

This is probably new as of CFMX 6.0 when they moved to a Java implementation. But perhaps this has always been there, and I just never noticed it?

Here's a code example:

<cfsavecontent variable="data">
here is my 
break
</cfsavecontent>

<cfoutput>#ReReplace(data, "\n", "<br />", "ALL")#</cfoutput>

It is much easier to use \n than going to an ASCII table and looking up the character code. I always get the codes for \r and \n mixed up, so I end up looking them up every time I want to use them.