BlueDragon Advantage - ListToArray

Continuing the list of technical advantages BlueDragon offers (it's so much more than just another way to run CFML), sometimes it's the little things. Just the other day, someone on a list was complaining about how the ListToArray function would skip empty list items (as CFML list functions generally do).

We recognized a long time ago that in the case of this list function especially, it might be important sometimes to honor that empty element in creating the array, so we added a new third argument, a boolean, which determines whether to include empty list elements in the resulting array. The default is no, which causes it to operate consistently with ColdFusion. Consider the following:

<cfset list = "1,2,,3">
<cfdump var="#listToArray(list,",")#">

Both ColdFusion and BlueDragon would return an array of 3 elements, even though there are 4 items in the list, the third of which is empty.

Use the newly available third argument to change this behavior:

<cfset list = "1,2,,3">
<cfdump var="#listToArray(list,",","yes")#">

This creates instead an array of 4 elements, with the third being empty.

Again, sometimes it's the little things.