All strings being equal…:) this was one strange problem to figure out.
I was using the CF debugger in eclipse yesterday and my ColdFusion (CF8) code kept throwing the same debugger error on simple string equality statements such as : if( stringVar1 EQ stringVar2)
Here is the debugger error:
coldfusion.runtime.Cast$NumberConversionException
The value XX cannot be converted to a number.
It took a little digging to figure out what the problem was but I think I finally got it
It seems that the exception is thrown by any direct comparison of strings. Now if you’ve been using CF as long as I have you are thinking that this is crazy because how else are you supposed to compare strings…. well there apparently is a better way to compare to strings. The solution is to use the compare or comparenocase functions. The way these work is basically as such: if(comparenocase(stringVar1, stringVar2) eq 0)
The function returns 0 if the strings are equivalent, and -1 or +1 if one or the other string is greater or less than the other. If you switch all of your string comparisons to this the debugger exception goes away. Apparently this is one of those cases where CF basically handles the exception gracefully however it still gets reported if the Exception Information option is turned on in the debugger settings on the server. If you uncheck the box marked Exception Information on the Debug Output Settings in the ColdFusion 8 administrator (and restart the server) these debug exceptions go away.
