Regular Expression Trouble

Question

Hello All, Happy Holidays.
I'm creating a component in an application that is similar to
Facebook's "News Feed" feature. This feature lists rows from a
database which may contain some 'special text' that needs to be
converted to HTML. Note: I am storing the 'special text' in the
database instead of the actual html code to save space in the
database in case the name of the object is very long.
Here's what I'm trying to do:
In the database a record might look like this:
On 12/25/06 [user:253]John Smith[/a] Logged On.
When I display the table I want to convert it to the
following:
On 12/25/06 <a href="user_info.cfm?userId=253">John
Smith</a> Logged On.
I've been able to create the following regular expression
which does a good job converting the text to a link, but I am
unable to get the uniqueID (253) from the string. Note: Description
is the name of the column that is being processed.
<CFSET temp = ReReplace(Description,'\[User:.\]','<a
href="user_info.cfm?userID=253">','ALL')>
<CFSET temp =
ReReplace(temp,'\[/a\]','</a>','ALL')>
Is there a way I can convert the string in one regular
expression? Also, how can I get the number value after the colon
(:) and insert it into the replacement string?
Also, to complicate things, the string may have multiple
instances of 'special text'. For example:
On 12/25/06 [user:253]John Smith[/a] modified
[user:262]Captain Picard's[/a] account
Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

If I read your requirement correctly, you should replace
this:
\[user:([^\]]*)](.*)?\[/a]
With this:
<a href="user_info.cfm?userId=\1">\2</a>
The bit you were missing from your regex was capturing the
subexpressions
for the ID and the name. Can I suggest you read this:
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/coldfusion/7/htmldocs/00000990.htm,
and have
a bit of an experiment.
Also, Regex Coach is good for testing stuff:
http://weitz.de/regex-coach/
Adam