ColdFusion Developer's Guide

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■ When ColdFusion evaluates an expression that contains a decision operator other than
CONTAINS or DOES NOT CONTAIN, it first determines if the data can be converted
to numeric values. If they can be converted, it performs a numeric comparison on the
data. If they cannot be converted, it performs a string comparison. This can sometimes
result in unexpected results. For more information on this behavior, see “Evaluation and
type conversion issues” on page 68.
■ When ColdFusion evaluates an expression with CONTAINS or DOES NOT
CONTAIN it does a string comparison. The expression A CONTAINS B evaluates to
True if B is a substring of A. Therefore an expression such as the following evaluates as
True:
123.45 CONTAINS 3.4
■ When a ColdFusion decision operator compares strings, it ignores the case. As a result, the
following expression is True:
"a" IS "A"
■ When a ColdFusion decision operator compares strings, it evaluates the strings from left
to right, comparing the characters in each position according to their sorting order. The
first position where the characters differ determines the relative values of the strings. As a
result, the following expressions are True:
"ab" LT "aba"
"abde" LT "ac"
String operators
String operators manipulate strings of characters. The following table describes the operators:
Operator Description
& Concatenates strings.
&= Compound concatenation. The variable on the right is used as both an
element in the concatenation operation and the result variable. Thus, the
expression a &= b is equivalent to a = a & b.
An expression can have only one compound assignment operator.
NOTE
In a Query of Queries, you use || as the concatenation operator.
Expressions 89