ColdFusion Read File

You can use ColdFusion's cffile tag to read a file from the server.

To read a file, you use the cffile tag to write the contents of the file to a variable. Once you've done that, it's up to you what you do with the contents of that variable. You can display it to the user, or you could insert it into a database (using the cfquery tag). It's also quite likely that you will want to manipulate the contents before you do anything with it.

Here's an example of reading an HTML file from the server, then outputting its contents:

<cffile action="read"
	file="C:\docs\shopping.html"
	variable="shoppingList">

<cfoutput>#shoppingList#</cfoutput>

Given this is an HTML file, the contents are interpreted by the browser:

If we wanted to view the source code, we could use ColdFusion's htmlCodeFormat() function when we output the results:

<cfoutput>#htmlCodeFormat(shoppingList)#</cfoutput>

This results in:

Binary Files

To read a binary file (such as an image or a word processing document), you need use action="readbinary". Although this puts the contents into a variable, you can't actually display the contents using the cfoutput tag. You can still insert it into the database, or write it to another file. If you need to display the contents of a binary file, this can be acheived using the cfcontent tag (but I'll save that for another lesson).

Next lesson shows you how to write files with ColdFusion.

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