User Guide

Reading, Writing, and Appending to a Text File 327

Reading, Writing, and Appending to a Text File

In addition to managing files on the server, you can use cffile to read, create, and

modify text files. As a result, you can do the following things:

• Create log files. (You can also use

cflog to create and write to log files.)

• Generate static HTML documents.

• Use text files to store information that can be brought into Web pages.

Reading a text file

You can use cffile to read an existing text file. The file is read into a local variable

that you can use anywhere in the application page. For example, you could read a

text file and then insert its contents into a database. Or you could read a text file and

then use one of the string replacement functions to modify the contents.

To read a text file:

1 Create a new file in ColdFusion Studio.

2 Modify the file so that it appears as follows:

<html>

<head>

</head>

<body>

Ready to read the file:<br>

<cffile action="Read"

file="C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mine\message.txt"

variable="Message">

#Message#

</cfoutput>

</body>

</html>

3 Replace C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mine\message.txt with the location and name of a

text file on your server.

4 Save the file as readtext.cfm and view it in your browser.