Lucee Developer

I needed to incorporate a news feed from yammer.com, which was pretty easy using their API. The return format is JSON, so all looked great. Except for the "rich text" they sent back:

As you can see, there are a lot of "\u00.." occurences in the rich text. I searched Google for a standard CFML solution to convert these character sequences, but found nothing for CFML. So I wrote the following function, which tries to convert the string as fast as possible:

<cffunction name="unicodeEscape" returntype="string" output="no">
	<cfargument name="s" type="string"/>
	<!--- If no unicode-escapes present in the string: return --->
	<cfif not find('\u', arguments.s)>
		<cfreturn arguments.s />
	</cfif>
	<!--- If % is present in the string: url-encode it. Otherwise, urlDecode would choke on it --->
	<cfif find('%', arguments.s)>
		<cfset arguments.s = replace(arguments.s, '%', urlEncodedFormat('%'), 'all') />
	</cfif>
	<!--- Ascii characters (\u0000 - \u00FF) can be translated as %00-%FF  --->
	<cfset arguments.s = replace(arguments.s, "\u00", "%", "all") />
	<!--- Higher characters (\u0100 - \uFFFF) can be translated as %01%00 - %FF%FF.
		Only do this regex if there is something to replace. --->
	<cfif find('\u', arguments.s)>
		<cfset arguments.s = rereplace(arguments.s, "\u([0-9A-F][0-9A-F])([0-9A-F][0-9A-F])", "%\1%\2", "all") />
	</cfif>
	<cfreturn urldecode(arguments.s) />
</cffunction>

If there is a built-in way in CFML to decode unicode-escapes, then please leave a comment. I'd be happy to learn :)