I personally dont like hardcoding things like texts and labels inside any compiled code, reason being , when it needs to be changed for whatever reason, I have to go through the pain of loading the project and making the change and then compiling it again and deploying it again , all for one little change. Its always better to save as many as possible config’s in a separate file (XML being the more appropriate choice). More »
Extracting links from a piece of HTML code is a very common task and any programmer would have come across this requirement at some point. I have always used regular expressions to achieve this and it has always worked for me, no complaints there. However, I was just curious to find some other way to do it.
Here is what I did.
used CFHTTP to get the HTML code.
Put it all in a CF XML Object
Got all links using Xpath
Put everything inside a CF query.
And it works! I was delighted to see the results. However, the only condition is that the HTML should be valid HTML or XHTML I must say. Well, nothing special I know but atleast I found out which people dont have valid HTML on their sites! ha!
XML parsing in Coldfusion has improved a lot in the last few versions but converting a complex XML object to a Coldfusion structure is still a struggle I beleive. There are a few custom tags out there for doing this but the ones that I have used or know are all only for simple structures, not nested or subnested structures. So I use this little function I and one of my other friends worked on and it works like a charm. More »
I find Xpath very powerul for searching through a XML document. I have used it extensively in some of my projects and it might be worth it to post some of the examples here. For this example, I have used the books.xml sample xml file which can be found here.
Following are some examples of what we can do with Xpath in Coldfusion. I have tried to keep the variable names self-explanatory so it should easy to figure out which statement is doing what. More »