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My friend, Mr. Steve Good, approached me about a problem he was having where he needed to add a namespace to an HTML tag at runtime. Essentially he was parsing some dynamic HTML and wished to inject an additional namespace into the HTML declaration. Regular expressions to the rescue! The first test I ran was with a blank <HTML> tag. For this example I will be injecting the SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics namespace. To accomplish this in ColdFusion we simply are using the replaceAll method against the String class in Java.
<cfset old = "<html>" />
<cfset new = old.replaceAll("(?i)(?<=<html)(.*?)>", "$1 xmlns:svg=""http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"">") />
<cfdump var="#new#" />The next task was to ensure that if the HTML tag already had a namespace our regex won’t erase it, but will instead append the new namespace to it. Let’s see that code.
<cfset old = "<html xmlns=""http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"">" />
<cfset new = old.replaceAll("(?i)(?<=<html)(.*?)>", "$1 xmlns:svg=""http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"">") />
<cfdump var="#new#" />I love me some regular expressions. Happy coding!