Question

I’m using reReplace to strip special characters from filenames. The following regex throws exceptions (see below) in my code. However, when I test the regex string in a ColdFusion Regex Utility it works just fine.

Here is my code:

reReplace(tmpName,"[{}\(\)\^$&%#!@=<>:;,~`'\'\*\?\/\+\|\[\\\\]|\]|\-",'','all')

And the error:

Error Messages: Invalid token @ found on line 29 at column 45.

The CFML compiler was processing:

An expression beginning with !, on line 29, column 44.This message is usually caused by a problem in the expressions structure.

If I escape the @ symbol with \@ I get this error:

Error Type: Template : [N/A] Error Messages: Invalid CFML construct
found on line 29 at column 45. ColdFusion was looking at the following
text:

\\
The CFML compiler was processing:

An expression beginning with !, on line 29, column 44.This message is usually caused by a problem in the expressions structure.

My original source for this regex string is: Regex to Strip Special Characters

I removed the . and _ as these characters should be allowed.

Answer 1

Because you have an unescaped # in the middle of the regex.

Bear in mind that # has special meaning in CFML, so if you want to use a literal #, you need to escape it as ##.

So your regex should be:

[{}\(\)\^$&%##!@=<>:;,~`'\'\*\?\/\+\|\[\\\\]|\]|\-