Comments on: ColdFusion regular expression backreferences and numeric strings http://duncan99.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/coldfusion-regular-expression-backreferences-and-numeric-strings/ Just another WordPress.com weblog Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:26:06 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Adam Cameron http://duncan99.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/coldfusion-regular-expression-backreferences-and-numeric-strings/#comment-497 Thu, 27 Sep 2012 22:32:01 +0000 http://duncan99.wordpress.com/?p=1516#comment-497 G’day Duncan (just found this blog of yours!)
Nice regex trick you’re documenting here.

@Dave:
CF doesn’t have its own regex processor, it just hands it off to Jakarta ORO (which is a long dead Apache project) under the hood (http://jakarta.apache.org/oro/). This is a Java implementation of PERL-compatible regular expressions. Java’s own java.uti.Regex patterns are slightly different. As to why Macromedia chose to use ORO instead of Java’s own regex support, I can only presume it was because ORO was closer to the regex implementation the pre-Java versions of CF (<= CF5) used, and MM didn't want to cause backwards compat issues. Ultimately this has proven to be quite annoying because CF is now stuck with this dead regex implementation, which is falling a bit behind where regexes are now. Fortunately Java regexes are easy enough to use in CF (google "Ben Nadel regex" for thorough coverage).

I've been trying to convince Adobe to upgrade CF's regex engine… it wouldn't hurt if the ticket got some more votes… https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3037998 ;-)

–
Adam

]]> By: duncan http://duncan99.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/coldfusion-regular-expression-backreferences-and-numeric-strings/#comment-489 Fri, 31 Aug 2012 14:22:28 +0000 http://duncan99.wordpress.com/?p=1516#comment-489 No idea! It might just be a quirk of how CF handles dynamic variables in the regex replacement string

]]> By: Dave Merrill http://duncan99.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/coldfusion-regular-expression-backreferences-and-numeric-strings/#comment-488 Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:54:50 +0000 http://duncan99.wordpress.com/?p=1516#comment-488 Thanks for this, I hit this yesterday.

Do you have any idea if the underlying Java has this same issue?

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