I need, in my funnel description, to filter out the root page.
Someone before me wrote /$ which should be fine, except if the user arrives to some URL like https://example.com/?campaign_utm=xxx: this won't be taken in account, will it?
How can I make sure this is also taken in account. This must be something pretty common, right?
Actually, Google Analytics will strip special query parameters, like utm_campaign and other UTM parameters. If you would like to filter your root page, possibly containing any parameters, you can modify your regex to accept end of string or ? character:
\/(\?|$)
More precisely, to catch your root, it should also contain beginning of string:
^\/(\?|$)
I am trying to write a regular expression to be used in a Google Analytics goal that will match URLs containing
?package=whatever
and also
/success
The user will first visit a page like
www.website.com/become-client/?package=greatpackage
and if they purchase they will be lead to this page
www.website.com/become-client/?package=greatpackage/success
So based on this I could use the following regex
\?package\=greatpackage/success
This should match the correct destination and I would be able to use this in the goal settings in Analytics to create a goal for purchases of the greatpackage package.
But sometimes the website will use other parameters in addition to ?package. Like ?type, ?media and so on.
?type=business
Resulting in URLs like this
www.website.com/become-client/?package=greatpackage?type=business
and if they purchase they will be lead to this page
www.website.com/become-client/?package=greatpackage?type=business/success
Now the /success part is moved away from the ?package part. My questions is how do I write a regex that will still match this URL no matter what other parameters there may be in between the parts?
---update----
#jonarz proposed the following and it works like a charm.
\?package\=greatpackage(.*?)/success
But what if there are two products with nearly the same name. For example greatpackage and greatpackageULTRA. The code above will select both. If changing the product names is impossible, how can I then select only one of them?
The regex that would solve the problem introduced in the edit, would be:
\?package\=greatpackage((\?|\/)(.*?))?\/success(\/|\b)
Here is a test: https://regex101.com/r/jS4cH5/1 and it seems to suit your needs.
If you want to match an url like this one :
www.website.com/become-client/?package=greatpackage?type=business?other=nada/success
With a group to extract your package type :
.*\?package=([^\/?]+).*\/success
Without group (just matching the url if it's containing package=greatpackage and success)
.*\?package=greatpackage.*\/success
Without group and matching for any package type :
.*\?package=[^\/?]+.*\/success
You just need to add .* to match any char (except new lines). The [^/?]* part is there to be sure your package type isn't empty (ie : the first char isn't a / nor ?).
I am trying to create a regexp to fire a tag within Google Tag Manager on certain pages.
The issue I am having is that I do not want to fire this tag on URLs matching a querystring in them, since it is only a session identifier and I do not need the tag to fire on the pages that have a query string. These are basically duplicates and they do not need tracking in a 3rd party tracking program. I know how I could exclude them in GA, but I can't figure out how to do it for the third party tracking.
I'll detail the scenario below and what I have tried.
Example pages that come up in my URL report if I look in GA:
/page
/page/subpage?my-handsome-query-string&some-other-data
/page/subpage
/page/subpage/subsubpage
/page/?query-string-again
So what I want to do is to fire the tracking on pages that does NOT have the query string, and it is proving quite the issue.
If I put in ^/page.*[^\?] it just doesn't work. I guess I am completely using the negated character class all wrong? I can't get it working and would require some assistance on how to devise a better regexp.
Some other I tried were:
^/page/.* but this one only matched everything after /page/ but not /page.
I am not very good with regular expressions, so what I basically want to do is match /page, /page/subpage, /page/subpage/subpage etc, but not any URL that has a query string in it.
In GTM I can't create two rules that says "Include {{url path}} matching this" and "Exclude {{url path}} matching \?", so it all needs to be done within one regexp... And that totally got me at a loss.
Edit: Mike gave a good answer to solve my GTM part, but I am still interested in learning if it is possible to do above but with a single regex?
You can actually create two rules as you described.
In GTM, tags can have both Firing rules and Blocking rules. Blocking takes precedence. eg.
Firing rule:
{{url}} matches ^page/.*
Blocking rule:
{{url}} does not contain ?
Another option is to use a custom javascript macro.
It is in the form of a function(){ } which can detect a query string value in window.location.search and return boolean. Then have a firing rule {{your custom fn}} equals 1.
You can also create a macro which uses the URL macro type and Query component type.
The value is set to the query string without the leading ?. If the url was example.com?foo=bar this macro would contain foo=bar. Then simply add a firing rule {{query}} matches Regex ^$ or {{query}} does not contain something-that-will-never-be-in-the-url-to-avoid-regex
I'm using CodeIgniter to write an app where a user will be allowed to register an account and is assigned a URL (URL slug) of their choosing (ex. domain.com/user-name). CodeIgniter has a URL routing feature that allows the utilization of regular expressions (link).
User's are only allowed to register URL's that contain alphanumeric characters, dashes (-), and under scores (_). This is the regex I'm using to verify the validity of the URL slug: ^[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254}$
I am using the url routing feature to route a few url's to features on my site (ex. /home -> /pages/index, /activity -> /user/activity) so those particular URL's obviously cannot be registered by a user.
I'm largely inexperienced with regular expressions but have attempted to write an expression that would match any URL slugs with alphanumerics/dash/underscore except if they are any of the following:
default_controller
404_override
home
activity
Here is the code I'm using to try to match the words with that specific criteria:
$route['(?!default_controller|404_override|home|activity)[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254}'] = 'view/slug/$1';
but it isn't routing properly. Can someone help? (side question: is it necessary to have ^ or $ in the regex when trying to match with URL's?)
Alright, let's pick this apart.
Ignore CodeIgniter's reserved routes.
The default_controller and 404_override portions of your route are unnecessary. Routes are compared to the requested URI to see if there's a match. It is highly unlikely that those two items will ever be in your URI, since they are special reserved routes for CodeIgniter. So let's forget about them.
$route['(?!home|activity)[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254}'] = 'view/slug/$1';
Capture everything!
With regular expressions, a group is created using parentheses (). This group can then be retrieved with a back reference - in our case, the $1, $2, etc. located in the second part of the route. You only had a group around the first set of items you were trying to exclude, so it would not properly capture the entire wild card. You found this out yourself already, and added a group around the entire item (good!).
$route['((?!home|activity)[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254})'] = 'view/slug/$1';
Look-ahead?!
On that subject, the first group around home|activity is not actually a traditional group, due to the use of ?! at the beginning. This is called a negative look-ahead, and it's a complicated regular expression feature. And it's being used incorrectly:
Negative lookahead is indispensable if you want to match something not followed by something else.
There's a LOT more I could go into with this, but basically we don't really want or need it in the first place, so I'll let you explore if you'd like.
In order to make your life easier, I'd suggest separating the home, activity, and other existing controllers in the routes. CodeIgniter will look through the list of routes from top to bottom, and once something matches, it stops checking. So if you specify your existing controllers before the wild card, they will match, and your wild card regular expression can be greatly simplified.
$route['home'] = 'pages';
$route['activity'] = 'user/activity';
$route['([A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254})'] = 'view/slug/$1';
Remember to list your routes in order from most specific to least. Wild card matches are less specific than exact matches (like home and activity), so they should come after (below).
Now, that's all the complicated stuff. A little more FYI.
Remember that dashes - have a special meaning when in between [] brackets. You should escape them if you want to match a literal dash.
$route['([A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_\-]{2,254})'] = 'view/slug/$1';
Note that your character repetition min/max {2,254} only applies to the second set of characters, so your user names must be 3 characters at minimum, and 255 at maximum. Just an FYI if you didn't realize that already.
I saw your own answer to this problem, and it's just ugly. Sorry. The ^ and $ symbols are used improperly throughout the lookahead (which still shouldn't be there in the first place). It may "work" for a few use cases that you're testing it with, but it will just give you problems and headaches in the future.
Hopefully now you know more about regular expressions and how they're matched in the routing process.
And to answer your question, no, you should not use ^ and $ at the beginning and end of your regex -- CodeIgniter will add that for you.
Use the 404, Luke...
At this point your routes are improved and should be functional. I will throw it out there, though, that you might want to consider using the controller/method defined as the 404_override to handle your wild cards. The main benefit of this is that you don't need ANY routes to direct a wild card, or to prevent your wild card from goofing up existing controllers. You only need:
$route['404_override'] = 'view/slug';
Then, your View::slug() method would check the URI, and see if it's a valid pattern, then check if it exists as a user (same as your slug method does now, no doubt). If it does, then you're good to go. If it doesn't, then you throw a 404 error.
It may not seem that graceful, but it works great. Give it a shot if it sounds better for you.
I'm not familiar with codeIgniter specifically, but most frameworks routing operate based on precedence. In other words, the default controller, 404, etc routes should be defined first. Then you can simplify your regex to only match the slugs.
Ok answering my own question
I've seem to come up with a different expression that works:
$route['(^(?!default_controller$|404_override$|home$|activity$)[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254}$)'] = 'view/slug/$1';
I added parenthesis around the whole expression (I think that's what CodeIgniter matches with $1 on the right) and added a start of line identifier: ^ and a bunch of end of line identifiers: $
Hope this helps someone who may run into this problem later.
I am attempting to set up a goal funnel in Google Analytics. It is for an online quote request system that we want to track. Basically all the pages that contain the quote request form have unique dynamically generated urls that are similar. The form of the URL is:
/quoterequest/categoryone/categorytwo/productname/
I have regex that works for tracking that:
^/quoterequest/([A-Za-z0-9/-]+)?
Today we added a thank you page after the user submits the form. The URL is always the same for that:
/quoterequest/thanks/
I would like to modify the above regex so that it continues to match any of the Quote Request URLs, but NOT that thank you URL. I have been trying different variations, including t. he negative look ahead,but unfortunately I am not very experienced with regex and I think I've been doing it completely incorrectly. Can anyone give me some insight as to the correct method of doing this?
You can use:
^\/quoterequest\/(?!thanks\/?$)(?:([A-Za-z0-9\-]+)\/?)*$
See it