Resolving variables inside a Coldfusion string

Question

My client has a database table of email bodies that get sent at certain times to customers. The text for the emails contains ColdFusion expressions like Dear #firstName# and

Answer 1

If the variable is in a structure from, something like a form post, then you can use "StructFind". It does exactly as you request. I ran into this issue when processing a form with dynamic inputs.

Ex.

StructFind(FORM, 'WhatYouNeed')

Answer 2

What other languages often do that seems to work very well is just have some kind of token within your template that can be easily replaced by a regular expression. So you might have a template like:

Dear {{name}}, Thanks for trying {{product_name}}.  Etc...

And then you can simply:

<cfset str = ReplaceNoCase(str, "{{name}}", name, "ALL") />

And when you want to get fancier you could just write a method to wrap this:

<cffunction name="fillInTemplate" access="public" returntype="string" output="false">
    <cfargument name="map" type="struct" required="true" />
    <cfargument name="template" type="string" required="true" />

    <cfset var str = arguments.template />
    <cfset var k = "" />

    <cfloop list="#StructKeyList(arguments.map)#" index="k">
        <cfset str = ReplaceNoCase(str, "{{#k#}}", arguments.map[k], "ALL") />
    </cfloop>

    <cfreturn str />
</cffunction>

And use it like so:

<cfset map = { name : "John", product : "SpecialWidget" } />
<cfset filledInTemplate = fillInTemplate(map, someTemplate) />

Answer 3

Not sure you need rereplace, you could brute force it with a simple replace if you don't have too many fields to merge

How about something like this (not tested)

<cfset var BaseTemplate = "... lots of html with embedded tokens">

<cfloop (on whatever)>

   <cfset LoopTemplate = replace(BaseTemplate, "#firstName#", myvarforFirstName, "All">
   <cfset LoopTemplate = replace(LoopTemplate, "#lastName#",  myvarforLastName, "All">
   <cfset LoopTemplate = replace(LoopTemplate, "#address#",   myvarforAddress, "All">

</cfloop>

Just treat the html block as a simple string.

Answer 4

CF 7+: You may use regular expression, REReplace()?

CF 9: use Virtual File System