Question

I want to do something in ColdFusion that is similar to sprintf in C or Perl. I found this
answer, which seems to be what I’m looking for. However, I can’t get it to work.

Here is what I’m trying:

<cftry>
    <cfset firstName="John">
    <cfset output=createObject("java","java.lang.String").format("Hello, %s!", firstName)>
    <cfcatch type="any">
        <cfdump var="#cfcatch#" expand="false">
    </cfcatch>
<cftry>

And here is what I get:

cfcatch.Message: The format method was not found.

cfcatch.Detail: Either there are no methods with the specified method
name and argument types or the format method is overloaded with
argument types that ColdFusion cannot decipher reliably. ColdFusion
found 0 methods that match the provided arguments. If this is a Java
object and you verified that the method exists, use the javacast
function to reduce ambiguity.

This is an overloaded method, so I did as suggested and used JavaCast on the arguments:

<cfset output=createObject("java","java.lang.String").format(JavaCast('string', "Hello, %s!"), firstName)>
<cfset output=createObject("java","java.lang.String").format("Hello, %s!", JavaCast('string', firstName))>
<cfset output=createObject("java","java.lang.String").format(JavaCast('string', "Hello, %s!"), JavaCast('string', firstName))>

and got the same error every time.

I tried another static method on the String class, valueOf, and it worked fine.

Edit:
I’ve already seen a comment, and I’m not sure how to respond to those, but maybe I should explain here. What I’ve shown above is an extremely simplified example of what I am trying to do. The goal is to use a format string to provide lots of formatting in one place, and then simply pass in a list of variables, instead of formatting a bunch of variables and outputting them, or formatting them as I’m outputting them. With the format method, I plan to build a set of format strings that match the output I need, then I will just cfloop or cfoutput over a query, run this one method inside, and get the output I want. No DateFormat, NumberFormat, Left, Right, etc. If I can’t get this working, that is plan B though.

I’m running ColdFusion 9.01, Windows 7, Java 1.6.0_22.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Answer based on my comment above:

It probably can’t match the format method you’re looking for because its signature is format(String, Object[]) and your second String argument can’t be automatically converted to an Object array.

You could change the argument to encapsulate the name in an array as follows: format("Hello, %s!", [firstName]).

Thanks to Leigh for being so courteous, I upvoted your comments 🙂