Utility Functions: REFindAll() and REFindAllNoCase()
- September 25, 2009 12:29 PM
- Utility Function
- Comments (2)
Its been a while since I released a utility function, so today I bring you a very closely related pair that solve a very simple problem thats missing with ColdFusion's Regular Expression functions. Given a regular expression in ColdFusion, you can find out if there is a match for that regular expression in a given string, and where it is, but you can't find out the location of ALL of the values that match the regular expression.
So now I've created REFindAll() and REFindAllNoCase() to handle that task. They each return an array of structures containing the pos and len values, just like the array you get from calling REFind() and REFindNoCase(), but unlike those functions, this gets you all occurrences in a single array.
<cfargument name="pattern" type="string" required="true" />
<cfargument name="string" type="string" required="true" />
<cfset var local = StructNew() />
<cfset local.result = ArrayNew(1) />
<cfset local.end = Len(arguments.string) />
<cfset local.current = 1 />
<cfloop condition="local.current lt local.end">
<cfset local.match = REFind(arguments.pattern, arguments.string, local.current, "true") />
<cfif local.match.pos[1] gt 0>
<cfset local.temp = StructNew() />
<cfset local.temp.pos = local.match.pos[1] />
<cfset local.temp.len = local.match.len[1] />
<cfset ArrayAppend(local.result, local.temp) />
<cfset local.current = local.match.pos[1] + local.match.len[1] />
<cfelse>
<cfset local.current = local.end />
</cfif>
</cfloop>
<cfreturn local.result />
</cffunction>
<cffunction name="REFindAllNoCase" output="false" returntype="array">
<cfargument name="pattern" type="string" required="true" />
<cfargument name="string" type="string" required="true" />
<cfset var local = StructNew() />
<cfset local.result = ArrayNew(1) />
<cfset local.end = Len(arguments.string) />
<cfset local.current = 1 />
<cfloop condition="local.current lt local.end">
<cfset local.match = REFindNoCase(arguments.pattern, arguments.string, local.current, "true") />
<cfif local.match.pos[1] gt 0>
<cfset local.temp = StructNew() />
<cfset local.temp.pos = local.match.pos[1] />
<cfset local.temp.len = local.match.len[1] />
<cfset ArrayAppend(local.result, local.temp) />
<cfset local.current = local.match.pos[1] + local.match.len[1] />
<cfelse>
<cfset local.current = local.end />
</cfif>
</cfloop>
<cfreturn local.result />
</cffunction>
Here is the example:
<cfdump var="#REFindAllNoCase("[a-z]+", test)#">
Which produces:
| array | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
| ||||||
| 2 |
| ||||||
| 3 |
| ||||||
| 4 |
| ||||||
| 5 |
| ||||||
| 6 |
| ||||||
Check back tomorrow for the next natural step with this function.
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