ebook on regular expressions for Google Analytics - LunaMetrics

anchorsThE c areT^When you use a caret in your Regular Expression,you force the Expression to match only strings that start exactlythe same way your RegEx does.I see carets misused all the time on various Google Analytics helpgroups. It goes something like this:“I want to include only subfolder2 in my profile. My URLs looklike: http://www.mysite.com/folder1/subfolder2/index.html. Icreated the include filter and the Regular Expression, which lookslike this: ^/subfolder2/index\.html. Why isn’t it working?”The reason it doesn’t work is that Google Analytics starts readingyour URL right after the .com (or .edu, or .net, as it were). The GAsees the above as /folder1/subfolder2/index.html. So whenthe person who wrote the question above starts his RegEx with^/subfolder2, he shoots himself in the foot. In the eyes of GA,/folder1 comes before /subfolder2, yet the caret mandates that/subfolder2 must be at the beginning of the target string. (Andit’s not! So it will never match.)a D va N Ced tI pWhen you put a caret inside square brackets at thevery beginning, it means match only characters thatare not right after the caret. So [^0-9] meansif the target string contains a digit,it is not a match.19