Interesting CFMail whitespace trick

I’m sure most Coldfusion developers have come across this situation before. When sending an email using <cfmail>, you might have some code that looks vaguely like this:

<cfif sendEmail EQ TRUE>
	<cfif today EQ "Monday">
		<cfloop query="getEmail">
			<cfmail ...>
				#getEmail.salutation# #getEmail.Name#
				
				#getEmail.message#
			</cfmail>
		</cfloop>
	</cfif>
</cfif>

All beautifully indented as it should be. However the recipient gets an email that looks like this:

				Hey Joe
				
				Where you goin' with that gun in your hand?

To get rid of the extra whitespace on each line, you normally have to un-indent the contents of your cfmail:

<cfif sendEmail EQ TRUE>
	<cfif today EQ "Monday">
		<cfloop query="getEmail">
			<cfmail ...>
#getEmail.salutation# #getEmail.Name#

#getEmail.message#
			</cfmail>
		</cfloop>
	</cfif>
</cfif>

Which just looks a bit ugly in amongst all your other code. However I found a neat trick a colleague was using, which I’ve not seen anywhere else.

<cfif sendEmail EQ TRUE>
	<cfif today EQ "Monday">
		<cfloop query="getEmail">
			<cfmail ...>
				#Chr(0)##getEmail.salutation# #getEmail.Name##Chr(13)#
				
				#Chr(0)##getEmail.message##Chr(13)#
			</cfmail>
		</cfloop>
	</cfif>
</cfif>

Chr(0) is the NULL character. However in Coldfusion it returns an empty string, not NULL. Chr(13) is the carriage return character. Together these have the effect of somehow stripping out the leading whitespace.

This only works if you use both Chr(0) at the start and Chr(13) at the end. I tested it with just Chr(0) and just Chr(13), and it didn’t work in either case. Chr(10) might also work, or Chr(13) and Chr(10) together, but I didn’t try testing it.

This trick worked for me on Coldfusion Server 7 and Coldfusion Server 8, but not Coldfusion Server 5. I didn’t test it on other CFML servers such as Railo or Open BlueDragon. Your mileage may vary.