Chapter 10. Regular Expressions

If you’ve never worked with regular expressions, you might not have any idea what they are, how they work, or what a powerful weapon they are to have in your arsenal. Regular expressions might be second nature to programmers who have come to ColdFusion from other programming backgrounds. They’re used extensively in languages such as Visual C++, Tcl, Java, and Perl, and they also can be used in JavaScript.

Regular expressions are used in ColdFusion to parse text, to find patterns or substrings within a string, and to replace patterns or substrings within a string. Regular expressions can be made up of letters, numbers, punctuation characters, and other special characters and metacharacters.

Metacharacters are the ...

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