re.replace

Supported in:

Rules Search

re.replace(stringText, replaceRegex, replacementText)

Description

Performs a regular expression replacement.

This function takes three arguments:

• stringText: the original string.
• replaceRegex: the regular expression indicating the pattern to search for.
• replacementText: The text to insert into each match.

Returns a new string derived from the original stringText, where all substrings that match the pattern in replaceRegex are replaced with the value in replacementText. You can use backslash-escaped digits (\1 to \9) within replacementText to insert text matching the corresponding parenthesized group in the replaceRegex pattern. Use \0 to refer to the entire matching text.

The function replaces non-overlapping matches and will prioritize replacing the first occurrence found. For example, re.replace("banana", "ana", "111") returns the string "b111na".

Param data types

STRING, STRING, STRING

Return type

STRING

Code samples

Example 1

This example captures everything after the @ symbol in an email, replaces com with org, and then returns the result. Notice the use of nested functions.

"[e-mail]" = re.replace($e.network.email.from, "com", "org")

Example 2

This example uses backslash-escaped digits in the replacementText argument to reference matches to the replaceRegex pattern.

"test1.com.google" = re.replace(
                       $e.principal.hostname, // holds "test1.test2.google.com"
                       "test2\.([a-z]*)\.([a-z]*)",
                       "\\2.\\1"  // \\1 holds "google", \\2 holds "com"
                     )

Example 3

Note the following cases when dealing with empty strings and re.replace():

Using empty string as replaceRegex:

// In the function call below, if $e.principal.hostname contains "name",
// the result is: 1n1a1m1e1, because an empty string is found next to
// every character in `stringText`.
re.replace($e.principal.hostname, "", "1")

To replace an empty string, you can use "^$" as replaceRegex:

// In the function call below, if $e.principal.hostname contains the empty
// string, "", the result is: "none".
re.replace($e.principal.hostname, "^$", "none")