textarea to list

this is what i want to do.
I want to have a textarea where I enter a list of company names, one per line.
after submitting the form, I'd want to put each line of the textarea into a cold fusion list and then query my database saying something like:

select name
from companies
where name IN (#mylist#)

Please tell me how to go about doing this.

First, why not just let the user enter the list as a list, in the textarea? Like "one, two, three"?

But anyway, you should be able to do this by treating the text in the textarea as a list that is delimited by a carriage return/line feed combination. Then you can just change the delimiter from the carriage return/line feed to a comma.:

<cfsavecontent variable="myList">
one
two
three
</cfsavecontent>

<cfset myList = listChangeDelims( myList, ',', '#chr(13)##chr(10)#' )>

Yep thanks. That's exactly what I figured as I tried.

Thanks!

So i have a textarea that is 5 cols wide and 20 rows long. Users are to copy and paste a list of numbers from an excel sheet into the textarea.

The column in the excel sheet either has a 5 digit number in it, or blank spaces, so the user will invariably copy & paste numbers with spaces.

For the life of me I cannot remove the blank spaces on submit:

thenumbers = 12345 54321 98765

This is what the source looks like if you output to an html page:
12345

54321
98765

what I get after turning it into a list:

newlist = 12345,,54321,98765

I have tried everything to get rid of that extra space. Well, I don't even know what it is because i can't seem to get rid of it.

Heellllp!

eastvillage...

If they are spaces, you might try something like this after you have converted it into a list:



haven't tested it... just a quick reply.. hope it works.

Prem