ASCII equivalent of CF's URLDecode?

Question

Hello, everyone.
Even though I've been working with CF for over a decade, this is going to sound like a total n00b question.  I'm just drawing a blank, right now.  Google isn't much help.
Is there an ASCII equivalent of URLDecode??
Where I work, everything that is inserted into a database goes through a filter that changes certain characters to their ASCII equivalent (ie, the less than "<" is altered to "&lt;").  For displaying the data, I need to revert the &lt; back to < for formatting (there are <br /> in place of line breaks, in the data.)
If not, I suppose I should check cflib to see if there is a UDF.  Hmm..
Respectfully,
^_^

Answer 1

Well, first, that's not ASCII encoding, that's HTML Entity Encoding.
Second, no. There is not a built-in function for decoding HTML entities. The purpose of the function is to use it when displaying output to the screen, not to use it before sotring data for later use.
Obviously that doesn't help since you already have a system that encodes before putting data into the DB. So you need a way to decode it.
If you are using CF8 or CF9, with all of the security hotfixes installed, or you are using CF10, then you'll have ESAPI available to you via Java integration. ESAPI is a security tool from OWASP with built-in encoders and decoders. You can use those. Here is how.
<cfoutput>
          <cfset string = "&lt;hi&gt;" />
          <cfset list = createObject("java", "java.util.ArrayList") />
          <cfset htmlCodec = createObject("java", "org.owasp.esapi.codecs.HTMLEntityCodec") />
          <cfset list.add(htmlCodec) />
          <cfset encoder = createObject("java", "org.owasp.esapi.reference.DefaultEncoder").init(list) />
          #string#
          <br />
          #encoder.decodeForHTML(string)#
</cfoutput>
Hope that helps.