Thanks for looking at my RegEx example.

Although I don’t think your reply is correct… I would say that all referrals contain “https” or “http://”

For instance if you create a new profile, and then add this custom filter:
Referral:(.+)
User-defined:$A1

Wait 24hours…
Visitors Tab > User-defined > Contains box ^https?://
…then you will see data.

Maybe you are thinking of the Source field, which does not contain the protocol. e.g. “blog.domain.com”? The referral for this domain would show “http://blog.domain.com/page.htm”.

Thanks anyway.

Phil.

Regarding “Minimal Match” or aka “Lazy Match” rather than Greedy Match. Maybe some more examples would be useful e.g.

match first instance of “&”
\?paramId=(.+?)&

match anything before the first instance of “&”
\?paramId=([^&]+?)
same as \?paramId=([^&]+)&

match 2 to 4 characters (more efficient method for GA import engine, but no difference in result).
\?paramId=(.{2,4}?)
Ref:http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html (link include some RegEx not support by GA RegEx)

WRT your regex, I have never seen a referring site come through with https or http:// so making it mandatory with the beginning caret^ is going to mess you up. I hope that is the advice you were looking for.

This post has errors…

* “1-3 to “1,3″
e.g. [0-9]{1-3} to [0-9]{1,3}

* .{2,2} to .{2}
e.g. baza{2,2}r to baza{2}r

* 0 to 999 would be [0-9]{1,3}
e.g. 0 to 255 try [0-2][0-5]{2} but this would Not match “166″, so a better expression would be…
^([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1([0-9][0-9])|2([0-4][0-9]|5[0-5]))$
http://www.google.co.uk/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55572

Thanks

Phil.

Also interested to here you thought on this expression…

Referral ^https?://www\.google\.(.{2,7})/([?#]hl=|search|webhp|url).*[?#&]cd=([1-9]|[1-9][0-9]).*&q=([^&]+)&(?!oi=(spell|revisions_inline|broad-revision|social_search|blog_result|microblog_result|sideways_refinements))

Good luck

…. and then tell me what you think. Look especially at the negative lookahead that Alan wrote about in the comments to that post.

Robbin

You are probably aware of this, but I thought I would point you out to a great regular expression tool that I use in all my development efforts (I am a web application developer by trade). It’s called “The Regex Coach” and can be downloaded at http://weitz.de/regex-coach/

It allows you to enter your regular expression in the “Regular expression” pane, and then test it across different strings that you enter into the “Target string” pane.

(note: Javascript regular expressions don’t play nice with usual regexp conventions. So if you have a bit of regexp operating great in The Regex Coach it will 99% likely work in your PHP/Perl/C++/etc code, but test thoroughly within your Javascript code).