So I was working on the update to the cookbook site to allow for auto-hyperlinking of tags and functions. I began my work by simply trying to get createUUID() to hyperlink.

So my initial regex simply looked for "createUUID()". One of the first things I realized is that the parens were special in regex. Therefore, I changed the regex to: "createUUID()". This worked beautifully so I began to put in the rest of the data. When I tested the display however, I noticed a problem. parseDateTime() was matching inside of lsParseDateTime().

Luckily regex makes this easy to solve. You can surround a regex with \b characters. What does this mean? Let me steal from the docs:

Specifies a boundary defined by a transition from an alphanumeric character to a nonalphanumeric character, or from a nonalphanumeric character to an alphanumeric character.

For example, the string " Big" contains boundary defined by the space (nonalphanumeric character) and the "B" (alphanumeric character).

The following example uses the \b escape sequence in a regular expression to locate the string "Big" at the end of the search string and not the fragment "big" inside the word "ambiguous".

reFindNoCase("\bBig\b", "Don't be ambiguous about Big.")

<!--- The value of IndexOfOccurrence is 26 --->

When used inside of a character set (e.g. [\b]), it specifies a backspace

This didn't quite work for me, and I couldn't figure out why. Then someone on IRC (I think it was my friend Boyzoid) suggested getting rid of the \b characters. I pointed out that this would result in a bad match - but then something occured to me. Read the docs again, this time notice the emphasis I added:

Specifies a boundary defined by a transition from an alphanumeric character to a nonalphanumeric character, or from a nonalphanumeric character to an alphanumeric character.

My regex was now "\bcreateUUID()\b". Notice that my last character was a ). Therefore, the \b there was trying to go the other way - from nonalphanumeric to alphanumeric. I simply dropped the \b from the end of the regex and everything (so far) worked fine.

Later on I'll write a blog entry about the replacement system and how you can add one to your site.