Comments on: Eliminating Whitespace in ColdFusion

By: Datico

Datico — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:26:25 +0000

Oops, for 1) I meant for my entire app

By: Datico

Datico — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:24:50 +0000

Of all the CF methods you mention, I have found the following best practice to be most useful:
1) for my entire app (put it in application.cfc onRequest() or at the top of every page or something).
2) ALWAYS wrap my output in a cfoutput tag.
This has simplified my development a lot and I have no white space issues any longer. The separation of concerns (code, output) has helped simplify my file structure; it is very clear where html output is happening and where it is not. I simply use a cfloop inside a cfoutput if I want to output a query. It also avoids the unpleasant issue of white-space trimmers mucking with my page and causing it to break (which happens rarely, but when it does can be a pain to fix).

By: Noname

Noname — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:35:18 +0000

To remove empty lines from an xml:

ReReplace(xml, “[\s]+[#Chr(13)##Chr(10)#]+”, “#Chr(10)#”, “ALL”)

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:08:29 +0000

Nice. Works like a charm.

Thanks!

By: Shawn

Shawn — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:49:32 +0000

Thanks, for the info saved me about a trimmed about a 1/6th off the download. I was going to go in manually and try to use the traditional methods you mentioned but this is much easier.

Thanks!

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:23:10 +0000

@Petron – Thanks for noticing the error, I’ve corrected the image.

By: petron

petron — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:04:46 +0000

This works awesome!

However make sure you put *.cfm instead of *.jsp in the url-pattern if you want it to work on your CF pages.

Thanks!

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:59:22 +0000

@Marcel – I haven’t come across a problem with javascript. If the javascript statements are correctly terminated etc, they should be rendered as intended. The servlet filter seems to be pretty clever at only removing what is not needed, but as with everything, give it a thorough test as my environment won’t be the same as yours.

By: Marcel

Marcel — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 10:11:06 +0000

Do you know how trimFilter behaves with Javascript code. A lot of these filters and solutions are breaking your javascript code, becuase they remove line breaks where they are needed.

By: Ethan Cane

Ethan Cane — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:59:48 +0000

Hi Simon,

I have used the trim method you mentioned before and it does indeed work wonderfully, however there is a side effect to this approach which I believe affects connections made via RDS. That is the only point to be wary of. As far as I can remember it will perform compression (white space management) against templates you load into Eclipse/Dreamweaver/(any other RDS capable client) rendering the content either un-editable or garbled.

Hopefully since most savvy developers won’t be using RDS (insecure) it won’t pose a huge problem and is best left for production setups anyway.

Hope that helps.

Ethan Cane
Web Developer