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At one of the usergroup sessions this week someone asked if there was a way to get file information (size, date time, etc.) easily using a function. I said they should use <CFDIRECTORY>, but afterwards remembered that we did indeed add a new function to Scorpio called GetFileInfo() which returns a structure containing:

• canread
• canwrite
• ishidden
• lastmodified
• name
• parent
• path
• size
• type

Which makes this a good opportunity to review some of the file i/o changes coming in Scorpio.

For starters, if you have ever had to work with large text files in ColdFusion (maybe parsing a large CSV file) you'll know that doing so is very inefficient. You probably use code like this:

This is slow for two reasons. Not only does ColdFusion read the entire file into memory in a variable all at once, but also looping through the file requires treating it as a list which involves lots of parsing which can also be resource intensive.

Well, inefficient no more. In ColdFusion Scorpio you'll be able to replace the above code block with this:

This code block open the file, reads one line at a time, and closes it when done. I actually used this myself recently in a ColdFusion code snippet that had to parse a massive tab delimited file, turning each line into a query row. Replacing the old <CFFILE> <CFLOOP> with a new <CFFILE FILE=> cut down processing time from several minutes to under 10 seconds.

Oh, and although reading files line by line is the more common use case, you can also read by n characters at a time, like this:

In addition to the <CFLOOP> enhancements, we've also added lots of new file i/o functions that you can use to access and manipulate files directly. The new functions include:

• FileClose()
• FileCopy()
• FileDelete()
• FileIsEOF()
• FileMove()
• FileOpen()
• FileRead()
• FileReadBinary()
• FileReadLine()
• FileSetAccessMode()
• FileSetAttribute()
• FileSetLastModified()
• FileWrite()
• GetFileInfo()
• IsImageFile()
• IsPDFFile()

Comments (11)

• 

  Am I safe in assuming that the file loop releases each line from memory when it's processing completes? Otherwise the memory issues will persist, but you didn't mention it explicitly so I thought I'd verify.

• 

  Rob, yes, it reads a line at a time, it does not keep previously read lines in memory, and so it does indeed solve that memory issue.
  
  --- Ben

• 

  Ben, this is awesome. I especially like being able to do file/directory operations in cfscript without having a bunch of UDFs!

• 

  you have just made my day! thanks for the info ben.

• 

  I cant wait to see the performace increase when dealing with CSV style files

• 

  Arrgh. So just release the @#$%@$#%^ thing already! :-)
  Seriously, looks like we're getting some very nice robust enhancements.
  Some which I can use like now! :-0
  
  Anyways, I do look forward to the release and your teaser points are nice to read. It's comforting to know the there are advantages to an owned and fiscally supported product - ie: features, and that Adobe's first full release under their own name (I think the current version has one of Adobe's longest official products names, something like "Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Standard Edition By Adobe", or something like that) should be a substantial re-launch for the product.

• 

  In the words or Dr Who, "Fantastic!"

• 

  Oh boy, this is going to solve so many problems I've had in the past using cffile/cfloop.
  Fantastic new feature.

• 

  I am wondering though if there is any functions for directory manipulation to complement then file I/O functions? That would be great also.

• 

  Hello Ben
  This is just great work. Thanks for all you did.

• 

  This is an old thread but I am parsing a large CSV file with data that might contain commas in each quoted string. For instance, one record might look like this: "454454545","Last Name, First Name","City, State" It's the comma INSIDE the quotes that is throwing everything off. How can I allow for this?