Regular Expression based search in CFEClipse for tags not containing an attribute

Question

I've got a few regular expressions down pat, but am struggling within CFEclipse to nail the syntax which finds:

all instances of the cfquery tag that don't contain the attribute name

I've tried

<cfquery [^>]*(?!(name=))[^>]*>

which I'd intended to trap:

the cfquery tag, followed by any number of characters that aren't the closing >, NOT followed by the name attribute, followed by any number of characters that aren't the closing >, followed by the closing >.

This finds plenty of matches, the some of which do contain the name attribute and some of which don't (so it's obviously incorrect).

Can anyone hit me with a clue stick on this one? Thanks!

Answer 1

It looks like you should be using an XML parser for this, but your issue is that [^>]* is greedy and will match through the name attribute if it exists. You need something like the following:

<cfquery (?![^>]*name=)[^>]*>

By moving the [^>]* into the negative lookahead you can make sure that "name=" does not exist in the string before the next >.

Answer 2

If you want your lookahead to act against each character until the end of the opening tag, you need to split the character class and the quantifier, like so:

<cfquery\b(?:(?!name=)[^>])*>

Note the \b (word boundary) instead of space - this will allow <cfquery> to match (whilst still blocking <cfqueryparam...> tags. (\b after an alphanumeric character ensures the next character is non-alphanumeric.)

Also worth pointing out, the (?:...) is a non-capturing group - similar to normal (...) but doesn't create a backreference since we don't need it.

Of course, there is a small possibility of this not matching correctly - if you have an attribute notname or you have name = "whatever" these will both be treated incorrectly.

To solve this, we can use a \b again before the name this time, and then use an optional \s to allow (but not require) any whitespace between the attribute name and the equals sign:

<cfquery\b(?:(?!\bname\s*+=)[^>])*>

And don't forget to make sure case-insensitive flag is enabled, if you might have tags/attributes in mixed/uppercase anywhere.