10.3 Regular Expressions

Haxe has built-in support for regular expressions. They can be used to verify the format of a string, transform a string or extract some regular data from a given text.

Haxe has special syntax for creating regular expressions. We can create a regular expression object by typing it between the ~/ combination and a single / character:

var r = ~/haxe/i;

Alternatively, we can create regular expression with regular syntax:

var r = new EReg("haxe", "i");

First argument is a string with regular expression pattern, second one is a string with flags (see below).

We can use standard regular expression patterns such as:

  • . any character
  • * repeat zero-or-more
  • + repeat one-or-more
  • ? optional zero-or-one
  • [A-Z0-9] character ranges
  • [^\ r\ n\ t] character not-in-range
  • (...) parenthesis to match groups of characters
  • ^ beginning of the string (beginning of a line in multiline matching mode)
  • $ end of the string (end of a line in multiline matching mode)
  • | "OR" statement.

For example, the following regular expression matches valid email addresses:

~/[A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+.[A-Z][A-Z][A-Z]?/i;

Please notice that the i at the end of the regular expression is a flag that enables case-insensitive matching.

The possible flags are the following:

  • i case insensitive matching
  • g global replace or split, see below
  • m multiline matching, ^ and $ represent the beginning and end of a line
  • s the dot . will also match newlines (Neko, C++, PHP, Flash and Java targets only)
  • u use UTF-8 matching (Neko and C++ targets only)

See the EReg API for details about its methods.