Resolving variables inside a Coldfusion string

Question

My client has a database table of email bodies that get sent at certain times to customers. The text for the emails contains ColdFusion expressions like Dear #firstName# and

Answer 1

What other languages often do that seems to work very well is just have some kind of token within your template that can be easily replaced by a regular expression. So you might have a template like:

Dear {{name}}, Thanks for trying {{product_name}}.  Etc...

And then you can simply:

And when you want to get fancier you could just write a method to wrap this:

And use it like so: