So the question I recently raised with myself was how would I go about looping over the contents of a file line by line using Coldfusion scripting? Well it turns out that it’s not too difficult although I did run into a small snag. First let’s look at how to loop over the lines in a file using cfscript. What I’m going to do is try to locate any ‘<cfinclude’ tags in the file being looped over and return the results.
Looping over lines
var loc_delimiter = chr(10);
var loc_numOfLines = listLen(arguments.fileData, loc_delimiter);
for(var i = 1; i <= loc_numOfLines; i = i + 1)
{
loc_matches = {};
loc_thisLine = listGetAt(arguments.fileData, i, loc_delimiter);
loc_matches.line = i;
loc_matches.matches = reMatchNoCase("<cfinclude", loc_thisLine);
if(!arrayIsEmpty(loc_matches.matches))
{
arrayAppend(loc_allMatches, loc_matches);
}
}
This assumes that file data has been read into memory using fileRead().
So our delimiter is chr(10) which means look for a new line feed. You can also use this in conjunction with the ‘return’ chr(13) to be safe. The key is to turn the file into a list delimited by the new line character and/or the carriage return character (these are the hidden characters you may have seen show up in your Word document by accidentally pressing some unknown key combination). Once we have a list we can loop through the length. For each loop we want to use the listGetAt() function to get the data on that line. Essentially and index is equal to a line in this context. We can then use a regular expression to look for any ‘<cfinclude’ matches and append them to an array if we find one.
At Monserrate Monastery in Bogotá, Colombia.