Question

I need to create a new layout dynamically using ColdFusion by scraping the top and bottom of the page and saving as 2 different variables.

The top stops at the top until this.

googleoff: all (This is in an HTML Comment)

The bottom starts at this

googleon: all (This is in an HTML comment)

until the end.

I am thinking that I can use regular expressions to do this.

Answer 1

Assuming that these comments only occur in the positions you have stated, you can easily do this with a regex string split:

<cfset Sections = String.split( '<!-- google(?:on|off): all -->' ) />

<cfset TopOfPage    = Sections[1] />
<cfset BottomOfPage = Sections[3] />

An updated regex would be needed if they comments are not fixed – for example, you can replace the spaces with \s* if the whitespace is unpredictable.

For comparison, here’s a non regex version:

<cfset EndOfTopPos      = find( '<!-- googleoff: all -->' , String ) - 1 />
<cfset StartOfBottomPos = find( '<!-- googleon: all -->' , String , EndOfTopPos ) + 22 />

<cfset TopOfPage    = left( String , EndOfTopPos ) />
<cfset BottomOfPage = right( String , len(String)-StartOfBottomPos ) />

Since this works with fixed strings, it is faster – but you would need to be repeating this several thousand times before this difference might be significant.