Search & Replace Request URI Filter in Google Analytics

Question

I have 2 landing pages:

/aa/index.php/aa/index/[sessionID]/alpha
/bb/index.php/bb/index/[sessionID]/bravo

Because the sessionID is unique, each of the landing page will be tracked as different pages. Therefore, I need a filter to remove the sessionID. These are what i want to track:

/aa/index.php/aa/index/alpha
/bb/index.php/bb/index/bravo

I created the Search and Replace Custom Filter on the Request URI:

Search String: /(aa|bb)/index\.php/(aa|bb)/index/(.*)
Replace String: /$1/index.php/$2/index/$3

But i get the /$1/index.php/$2/index/$3 being reported on the dashboard the next day. So i tried /\1/index.php/\2/index/\3 but i got very strange results, //aa/index.php/aa/index/alpha/index.php/aa/index/aa.

Does anyone know how to reference the grouped patterns in the replace string?

My Solution: i managed to solve it using Advanced Filter. My solution:

Field A => Request URI: /(aa|bb)/index\.php/(aa|bb)/index/(.*)/(.*) 
Field B => - 
Output to => Request URI: /$A1/index.php/$A2/index/$A4

Answer 1

I haven't used the Google Analytics regex engine, but it appears to me that \1 is referencing the entire match (which in other regex implementations is called \0), while \2 is the first group, \3 is the second group, and so on.

Your initial regex, however, looks incomplete--I think it should look as follows:

Search String: /(aa|bb)/index\.php/(aa|bb)/index(/.*)/(alpha|bravo)
Replace String: /\2/index.php/\3/index/\5

(Note that I'm not sure whether ? is supported in this regex implementation as the non-greedy modifier, but if it is, the above search string pattern might run a little faster if you change /.* to /.*?.)