Question

I am using ColdFusion 9.

I am outputting a chunk of text from a database to be directly into a web page. I don’t want users to have to write HTML and screw things up. So, I am having them insert a double at sign “@@” to denote a new paragraph. Data is stored like this:

 @@This is my first paragraph. @@This will be my second paragraph. @@This is my third.

What I want to do is create a function that will turn the above block of text into the block of text below:

 <p>This is my first paragraph.</p>
 <p>This will be my second paragraph.</p>
 <p>This is my third.</p>

I will never know whether the user actually used any @@ signs or not. If they didn’t, I’ll need to wrap the entire block in a p tag.

My first thought is to do this:

1. Wrap the entire block into a p tag.
2. Replace the first occurrence of @@ with “” (nothing).
3. Replace every other occurrence of @@ with </p><p>

Is this the right way of accomplishing this task?

Answer 1

REReplace(your text, "@@([^@]+)", "<p>\1</p>", "all");

should sort it!