Nerd Alert Ultra-specific nerdery.

I needed to build a function that would strip out characters in event information because, otherwise it would break a JSON feed. Here is what I used:

<cffunction name="jsonSafe" access="private">
  <cfargument name="str" type="string" required="true">
  <cfset newStr = reReplace(arguments.str, '[^[:alnum:][:space:]$=;.?!\\/&"''`():,\[\]{}_\-]', '_','all')>
  <cfreturn newStr>
</cffunction>

The DeserializeJSON() function in ColdFusion converts an epoch date/time in JSON from something like: 1281364965000 to: 1.281364965E+012.

To prevent this from happening, you can use something like this:

<cfset jsonData = reReplace(jsonData, '([0-9]{13})', '"\1"', 'ALL')>

Alternatively, to convert any number, 10 digits or more into a string to preserve the proper formatting, use something like this:

<cfset jsonData = reReplace(jsonData, '([0-9]{10,})', '"\1"', 'ALL')>