Problem
You have a long article and want to show the first 20 words and the last 20 words of the article to show as a summary.
Solution
By taking advantage of the fact that ColdFusion runs on Java, we can use java.util.Arrays class to get a range of elements from an array of words.
Detailed explanation
<!--- some dummy text to demonstrate with ---> <cfsavecontent variable="article"> <p>I am just writing some random words here so that I can demonstrate using the java.util.Arrays class in ColdFusion. As you may know ColdFusion runs on top of java which means we can use it in our code. </p> <p>This is the second paragraph which has even more words in it and I'm running out of things to say, but I think we should have enough.</p> </cfsavecontent> <!--- set how many words to show from the start and end of the full article ---> <cfset wordsToShow = 10 /> <!--- strip HTML tags ---> <cfset article = ReReplaceNoCase( article, "<[^>]*>", "", "all" ) /> <!--- create a java.util.Arrays instance ---> <cfset JavaArrayObject = CreateObject( "java", "java.util.Arrays" ) /> <!--- split the article in an array of words using a space ---> <cfset articleArray = article.Split( " " ) /> <!--- copy the first n words of the article ---> <cfset startWordArray = JavaArrayObject.copyOf( articleArray, wordsToShow ) /> <!--- copy the last n words of the article ---> <cfset endWordArray = JavaArrayObject.copyOfRange( articleArray, ArrayLen( articleArray ) - wordsToShow, ArrayLen( articleArray ) ) /> <!--- convert back to a string to display ---> <cfset snippet = ArrayToList( startWordArray, " " ) & "…<br />…" & ArrayToList( endWordArray, " " ) /> <!--- display the snippet ---> <cfoutput> <p>#snippet#</p> </cfoutput>
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