Question

I’m trying to rereplace any words that begin with @ in my string…

I’ve tried a number of variations, but none of them seem to be working…

rereplace(getMessages.term, "[\s]?\B@\w+", "", "ALL")

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

CF’s built-in regex doesn’t support look-behinds, which is what you need to achieve this (since you want to look “behind” (before) the @ and verify what is/isn’t there, without including it in your match).

However you can easily dip into Java, to make use of Java’s regex support (which does support look-behinds), as simply as this:

<cfset Text = Text.replaceAll('(?<!\w)@\w+','') />

The (?<!\w) part is a negative look-behind saying “make sure there is no \w before this position”.

You might also want to consider using (?<!\S) which will prevent any non-whitespace character, or if you need to match specific characters then use (?<![a-z_\-.,]) or whatever.