Multiple Chr. Delimiters

[Guest]

Is there a way to use multiple characters as a delimiter? For instance:

<cfloop index="i" list="1 : 2 : 3 : 4" delimiters=" : "></cfloop>

If not -- how would you do this. We have data comming from a third party and it has some inconsistent data. If we can use multiple delimiters then it will solve the problem.

[paross1]

Per live docs at cfloop: looping over a list or file

You can put more than one character in the delimiters attribute, in any order. For example, this loop processes commas, colons, and slashes as list delimiters:

<cfloop index = "ListElement"
list = "John/Paul,George::Ringo"
delimiters = ",:/">
<cfoutput>#ListElement#</cfoutput><br>
</cfloop>

Phil

[Guest]

What if you need the delimiter to be " : "? Here is an example of the data we are dealing with:

Cards: US : Paper : Trash

"Cards: US is the first item. Not Cards and then US. There are only 3 items in this list NOT 4. If we use ":" as the delimiter it would appear to be 4 different items.

[SafariTECH]

You may want to use a different separator then, because a delimiter is a single character. You can define multiple delimiters for the command to look for, but the delimiter still has to be a single character.

We usually use the pipe (|) because it is a non-standard character that you won't find cropping up in everyday strings, like colons or commas do.

[Newsgroup_User]

> You can put more than one character in the delimiters attribute, in any
> order. For example, this loop processes commas, colons, and slashes as list
> delimiters:

I didn't take the requirement to mean "more than one delimiter", but to be
"one multi-character delimiter"..?

CF does not support multi-character delimiters natively. You can use the
Java split() method to split your list into an array, and then loop over
the array.

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#split(java.lang.String)

--
Adam

[Newsgroup_User]

<cfscript>
theList="1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5 : test:meElmo : duck:and:cover";
mcRegex="\s:\s";
pattern=createObject("java","java.util.regex.Pattern").compile(mcRegex);
parsedArray=pattern.split(theList);
</cfscript>

<cfdump var="#parsedArray#">

[Guest · Accepted solution]

Thanks everyone -- got it!