HTMLCodeFormat Difference Between Adobe CF and Railo

Today I came across a small but annoying difference between the way Adobe CF and Railo implement the HTMLCodeFormat() function that I want to share.

A few days ago I turned on whitespace management on my Railo server and noticed that the code blocks in my blog entries were losing all their indenting. I checked the database and all the carraige returns and tabs were still in their so I am fairly confident that the whitespace management was to blame. Now I could have simply turned it back off but I didnt really want to so I decided to try code around the problem.

Solution On Railo

So after a little research I came up with the simple code block to convert carraige returns and tabs to html. I tested and deployed it all on Railo and life was good.

<!--- Escape all the code I want to display in my code block --->
<cfset formatedCode = htmlCodeFormat(rawCode)>            

<!--- Convert carriage returns to html <br/> --->
<cfset formatedCode = REReplaceNoCase(formatedCode,"\r","<br/>","all")>

<!--- Convert tabs to 5 * html &nbsp; --->
<cfset formatedCode = REReplaceNoCase(formatedCode,"\t","&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;","all")>

Adobe CF Is Different

So today I come along and decide to do some cross platform testing on my site. I load up my local copy in railo and everything looks fine, but when I load it in Adobe CF all my code blocks are missing their indenting and carraige returns.

Needless to say this had me scratching my head for a while until I noticed a small difference between the Adobe livedocs and the Railo wiki for the HTMLCodeFormat() function. Note the following highlighted difference in the function documentation.

Railo HTMLCodeFormat()

Replaces special characters in a string with their HTML-escaped equivalents and inserts <pre> and </pre> tags at the beginning and end of the string.

Adobe HTMLCodeFormat()

HTML-escaped string string, enclosed in <pre> and </pre> tags. Return characters are removed; line feed characters are preserved. Characters with special meanings in HTML are converted to HTML character entities such as >.

The Solution

Now I really didn't need to do anything to fix this as it is unlikely I will every run my blog on Adobe CF, but just on the off chance I decided I might as well fix it while I know what the issue is.

<!--- Replace all carriage returns with a temporary placeholder --->
<cfset formatedCode = REReplaceNoCase(formatedCode,"(\r)","
","all")>

<!--- Escape all the code I want to display in my code block --->
<cfset formatedCode = htmlCodeFormat(rawCode)>            

<!--- Convert marked carriage return placeholders to html <br/> --->
<cfset formatedCode = REReplaceNoCase(formatedCode,"
","<br/>","all")>

<!--- Convert tabs to 5 * html &nbsp; --->
<cfset formatedCode = REReplaceNoCase(formatedCode,"\t","&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;","all")>

As you can see my solution was to replace all the carriage returns with a place holder string which I knew would be unique before escaping my code. Then once I had escaped my code I could safely convert the place holder to actual html <br/> tags.

Now there might be a more elegant solution than this (I'd love to hear about it), but for now this code works consistently on Railo and Adobe CF and gives me my desired output.