Question

Lets say I have a string The big brown fox jumped<br> over the fence. How could I specify that I want to keep only the characters that are before the <br> tag, stripping out the rest?

Answer 1

I use something similar, don’t know if it’s more efficient.

<cfset string = "The big brown fox jumped<br> over the fence.">

<cfset firstPiece = listGetAt(string, 1, "<br>")>
<cfoutput>#firstPiece#</cfoutput>

I like it because I determine the output prior to output rather than on output. But orangepips is nice because you could tailor your output based on the context..

EDIT

As pointed out in the comments the above code indeed produces "The" because of the way CF treats each character as a delimiter.

But <cfset firstPiece = listGetAt(string, 1, "<") produces "The big brown fox jumped".

From the CF Documentation

Delimiters

A string or a variable that contains
one. Character(s) that separate list
elements. The default value is comma.

If this parameter contains more than
one character, ColdFusion processes
each occurrence of each character as a
delimiter.