Sometimes in Coldfusion development its handy to use coldfusions standard functions such as CFfile or CFdirectory. But you can also invoke the underlying Java objects that share similar functionality. These can often be more efficient too, as there is no coldfusion server compilation layer involved.

For one piece of work I had recently I was reading a series of files, parsing them out and inserting a the collection of records into a database.

So I created used a java file reader object to read the files.

There is the odd extra config line in here, as the server pathing is unix based not windows based, and I'm dynamically reading the files from the directory.

Next I use the file name variable in the java FileReader object call. I wrap the file reader in a BufferedReader object as this greatly reduces the operation overhead of the FileReader object as the data is buffered into memory and not read from the disk.

Next I'll loop over the outptut string from the buffered file reader object, parsing each line and invoking the cfc method of 'processContent', passing in the string (line of data) as the argument 'content'. '

Now you can perform any sort of parsing you want to perform on the content. In the example below I am creating a local structure and populating it with each delimited value. This allows me to use standard notation to pick out individual elements for whatever processing you want.