Outputting clean, random text

[straffenp]

Hi all,

On the homepage of my Web site, I have an area where part of an article displays with a link to the full article text. The article that is loaded is random (base don the code below), and limited to a 200-character output. Now, some of my articles have simple HTML tags in them like break and paragraph. What I'm trying to do with the following script is:

• select a random article from the query
• strip it of HTML tags (I don't want the formatting preserved in the article preview, but I do want it preserved for the full text)
• output only 200 characters.
• link to the full article text

When I try the method below, I get the "You have attempted to dereference a scalar variable of type class java.lang.String as a structure with members" error. Can someone help clear this up for me? Thank you!

<cfquery name="GetArticles" datasource="DS">

SELECT ArticleID,ArticleText,Active

FROM News

WHERE Active = -1

ORDER BY ArticleID

</cfquery>

<cfoutput>

#Dateformat(Today, "mmmm d, yyyy")#</strong><br />

<cfset displayRow = randRange(1, GetArticles.recordCount)>

<cfset CleanText = REReplaceNoCase(GetArticles.ArticleText, "</?[^>]*>", "", "all")>

<cfset ShortText = left(CleanText, 200)>

<cfdump var="#ShortText[variables.displayRow]#">...<a href="news/article.cfm?articleid=#GetArticles.ArticleID[variables.displayRow]#"><strong>Read more</strong></a>

</cfoutput>

[JMF3]

Here's a function I use to strip HTML from content:

// match from

http://haacked.com/archive/2004/10/25/usingregularexpressionstomatchhtml.asp

x

var reTest =

"</?\w((\s\w(\s=\s(?:"".?""|'.?'|[^'"">\s]))?)+\s|\s)/?>"; //

"(...<a href="news/article.cfm?articleid=#GetArticles.ArticleID[variables.dis playRow]#">*Read more*</a>

</cfoutput

[Dan_Bracuk]

Your error was caused by not specifying the rownumber when setting the cleantext variable.

[straffenp]

Thanks for the feedback, Dan and JMF,

I'm a CF amateur learning as I go along, so please excuse my ignorance. Dan, to define the rownumber in CleanText, I tried this line of code, but I received an error:

<cfset CleanText = REReplaceNoCase(GetPrayers.PrayerText, "</?[^>]*>", "", "all")[variables.displayRow]>

Could you show me how it should be?  Also, then, when I go to output ShortText, the code will look like the following?

<cfset ShortText = left(CleanText, 200)>
<cfdump var="#ShortText#">

Thanks again.

[Dan_Bracuk]

Right variable, wrong place.  You want queryname.fieldname[rownumber]. 

[straffenp]

Got it! Thanks very much, Dan.