I'm blogging this little snippet mostly so that I have a place to find it the next time I need it, but perhaps it'll come in handy for someone else as well.
I'm creating some Javascript function calls on the fly as I output some query results. One of the parameters in the JS function is the value of an item's title which may at times contain characters JS tends to barf on, such as the single quote: '
In order to automatically escape such characters as I create my JS call, I used CF's ReReplace function. This function utilized a regular expression in order to do a search and replace, so I just created a simple regex that contained a list of all the characters i wanted to be automatically escaped.
Snippet time.
The specific code that performs the replacement:
Distilled version of the output code:
<cfoutput query="qryVideos">
<a href="##" onclick="playVideo('#videoID#','#ReReplace(Ucase(videotitle),"(['|.|;|?])","\\\1","all")#','#vidPathRoot#/#videoPath#');return false;">watch this video</a>
<br>
</cfoutput>
)