MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION MX 61-DEVELOPING COLDFUSION MX, Develop Manual, Page: 89 / 860

Using pound signs 89
5
Executes the
UCase
function on the string argument "we all need more sleep!" to get "WE ALL
NEED MORE SLEEP!".
6
Assigns the string value "WE ALL NEED MORE SLEEP!" to the variable myStringVar.
ColdFusion completes steps 1-3 before invoking the function.
Using pound signs
Pound signs (#) have a special meaning in CFML. When the ColdFusion server encounters
pound signs in CFML text, such as the text in a
cfoutput
tag body, it checks to see if the text
between the pound signs is either a variable or a function.
Is so, it replaces the text and surrounding pound signs with the variable value or the result of the
function. Otherwise, ColdFusion generates an error.
For example, to output the current value of a variable named
Form.MyFormVariable
, you delimit
(surround) the variable name with pound signs:
<cfoutput>Value is #Form.MyFormVariable#</cfoutput>
In this example, the variable
Form.MyFormVariable
is replaced with the value assigned to it.
Follow these guidelines when using pound signs:
•
Use pound signs to distinguish variables or functions from plain text.
•
Surround only a single variable or function in pound signs; for example, #Variables.myVar# or
#Left(myString, position)#. (However, a function in pound signs can contain nested functions,
such as #Left(trim(myString), position)#.
•
Do not put complex expressions, such as
1 + 2
in pound signs.
•
Use pound signs only where necessary, because unneeded pound signs slow processing.
The following sections provide more details on how to use pound signs in CFML. For a
description of using pound signs to create variable names, see
“Using pound signs to construct a
variable name in assignments” on page 93
Using pound signs in ColdFusion tag attribute values
You can put variables, functions, or expressions inside tag attributes by enclosing the variable or
expression with pound signs. For example, if the variable CookieValue has the value "MyCookie",
the following line sets the
cfcookie value
attribute to "The value is MyCookie":
<cfcookie name="TestCookie" value="The value is #CookieValue#">
You can optionally omit quotation marks around variables used as attribute values as shown in the
following example:
<cfcookie name = TestCookie value = #CookieValue#>
However, surrounding all attribute values in quotation marks is more consistent with HTML
coding style.
If you use string expressions to construct an attribute value, as shown in the following example,
the strings inside the expression use single quotation marks (’) to differentiate the quotation
marks from the quotation marks that surround the attribute value.
<cfcookie name="TestCookie2" value="The #CookieValue & 'ate the cookie!'#">