Query of Queries -- Whitespace Is Important
I've been working on modifying the QueryParamScanner to have a new screen that will allow me to fix the queries and update the files automatically. I finally seem to have everything working and I have the code setup so I can edit the suggested changes to fix anything that the regular expression didn't guess correctly. Last night I was running a final test and I noticed that I had lost all of the whitespace at the beginning and end of each query.
I knew I hadn't set up a trim, and I knew the whitespace was still present when I submitted the form. I stepped through the process and found that when I used query of queries to control the order in which I was replacing my queries, my whitespace disappeared :(
Here's some code to demonstrate the phenomenon:
<cfset tab = chr(09)>
<cfset testingwithwhitespace = crlf & tab & tab & "Value With Tabs and Spaces" & crlf & tab & tab & crlf & tab & tab & crlf>
<cfset testingwithoutwhitespace = "Value Without Tabs and Spaces">
<cfsavecontent variable="testingHTML">
<html>
<head>
<title>White Space Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>White Space Test</div>
</body>
</html>
</cfsavecontent>
<cfset qryTesting = QueryNew("Description,testvalue")>
<cfset rowid = queryAddRow(qryTesting)>
<cfset querySetCell(qryTesting,"Description","Testing String with whitespace",rowid)>
<cfset querySetCell(qryTesting,"testvalue",testingwithwhitespace,rowid)>
<cfset rowid = queryAddRow(qryTesting)>
<cfset querySetCell(qryTesting,"Description","Testing HTML",rowid)>
<cfset querySetCell(qryTesting,"testvalue",testingHTML,rowid)>
<h1 align="center">Before Query of Query</h1>
<cfoutput query="qryTesting">
#qryTesting.description#<hr />
<span style="background:yellow">#HTMLCodeFormat(qryTesting.testvalue)#</span><br /><br />
</cfoutput>
<cfquery dbtype="query" name="qofqAutoTrim">
SELECT Description,testvalue
FROM qryTesting
</cfquery>
<h1 align="center">After Query of Query</h1>
<cfoutput query="qofqAutoTrim">
#qofqAutoTrim.description#<hr />
<span style="background:yellow">#HTMLCodeFormat(qofqAutoTrim.testvalue)#</span><br /><br />
</cfoutput>
Here is the output of the test code:
Before Query of Query
Testing String with whitespace
Value With Tabs and Spaces
Testing HTML
<html>
<head>
<title>White Space Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>White Space Test</div>
</body>
</html>
After Query of Query
Testing String with whitespace
Value With Tabs and Spaces
Testing HTML
<html>
<head>
<title>White Space Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>White Space Test</div>
</body>
</html>
As you can see, the ColdFusion Query of Query is "helping" us by trimming all whitespace off the start and end of our strings. I have Googled and can find no reference of anyone else having this problem before. I am getting the same behavior with CF 8.0.1 Ent/Win and CF 7.0.2 Stan/Lin.
confused, but in most languages you initialise strings with some quoting system. Here it is more
confusing since this is SET language, where variable is delimited by tags, and while there is no option to do
<var>" string "</var> and recieve unquoted ' string ', it produces necessity to explicitely use quotes,
what is bit confusing at all, but maybe lower evil than using quotes everytime, or typing some "NoTrim"
attribute to declaration tag.
The basic problem here is white space (tabs, spaces, and line breaks) as part of a string variable (and more specifically at the beginning and end of one) should be considered non-trivial and should be preserved. The query of query functionality in ColdFusion trims off that leading and trailing white space which is an unexpected behavior.
write the code, i was just debugging it. One of the entries had a space at the end of the string. when i tried to use this item from the query to find the item from
the other query, I couldnt find it. The query was outputing the variable with the extra space at the end. but when trying to compare it to the other, almost identical
query results, it couldnt find the value because the query of queries was ignoring that extra white space.