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
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')
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) />
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.
CF 7+: You may use regular expression, REReplace()?
CF 9: use Virtual File System