There was a question asked on the CFML Slack channel recently which I answered. I thought I’d share it here in case it’s useful for others.

The problem was that the user had a string which was composed of 6 digit sequences of characters. As there was no delimiters the user wanted to know how to get each ‘chunk’ of 6 digit sequences.

Here’s an example of the string they had:

ab12ergr3eba23erca

The desired output is the following array:

["ab12er","gr3eba","23erca"]

We could tackle this using a good old loop, something like this:

token = "ab12ergr3eba23erca";

result = [];
while(token.len() > 6) {
    result.append(token.left(6));
    token = token.mid(6, token.len());
}

writeDump(result);

That does the job, but I think this exercise is a good example of where the power of regular expressions can solve all kinds of problems like this.

token = "ab12ergr3eba23erca";
chunks = reMatch(".{6}", token);
writeDump(chunks);

You can run the above code using this link: https://cffiddle.org/app/file?filepath=d15721a5-0f9f-4c77-9ee7-3deae58a3af2/9b5ee3b9-1b76-4359-99fb-c69437bb03ec/144d2084-4c76-4397-b2f9-5fde937aaadf.cfm

We can see that we do indeed get the desired result. So how does the pattern .{6} work? In regular expressions a ‘.’ is a special character that matches any character. The ‘{6}’ says that we want to get six matches – in this case, we are asking for 6 of any character.

I’m not an expert on regular expressions, but I do find them incredibly useful so would recommend at least learning the basics.