Using StringBind in BoxLang

[giscus[bot]]

Using StringBind in BoxLang

An example of the StringBind function.

https://www.raymondcamden.com/2025/08/18/using-stringbind-in-boxlang

[JamoCA]

This is great mail-merge-like function to have built into the language. (Is there anything like this available for CFML at CFLib.org?)

I wrote a UDF with a similar functionality. In addition to the optional parameters with fallback default values, it also accepted a "lang" argument that check to determine if translated text from a database existed. It would also format phone numbers and dates using the allowed locales.

[cfjedimaster]

I can't see how this would be doable in CF unless you used evaluate, which is generally a no no, and default values wouldn't work for sure. You could, of course, do parsing of the string, create a re-usable routine from it, all behinds the scenes. And by "you", I mean someone better than I am in CF. :>

[JamoCA]

Evaluate? (I stopped using that a couple of years ago as it is deemed "unsafe".)

You can leverage either structKeyExists or .keyExists(). Before replacing the token, I now check for a delimiter and use ListFirst to extract the variable name and ListRest to identify the desired default value.

For example, I have client that has event website and they use {EventStartDate:TBD} in their WYSIWYSG editor for the date that their event starts. When outputting the content, the value is replaced with the official EventStartDate value from the database for the current event year if it exists, otherwise it falls back to display the remaining TBD string. This prevents them from having to manually search & update web pages just because an annually global date has changed. (NOTE: When using "dates", I also allow them to append a date modifier (ie, long, fullmil & fullmilordinal) so they can specify the format since some require date-only while others require time and/or timezone to be displayed. (This ends up looking like {EventStartDate_long:TBD}.)

It took me a little while, but I found my prior art. I shared a basic "TokenReplace" UDF back in 2020 that performs similar functionality. (NOTE: This version doesn't leverage a fallback value in the original string.)
https://dev.to/gamesover/tokenreplace-a-coldfusion-user-defined-function-155b

Here's a direct link to the UDF gist w/demo:
https://gist.github.com/JamoCA/18e4d1662e8417fc824e264b2490dd1b

NOTE: I also just noticed on TryCF that this UDF may not work correctly in CF10 or Lucee5, but it works with every other more-modern CFML versions (including TryCF's BoxLang).

[cfjedimaster]

Nice!