CFCONTENT outputing to Excel issue

Question

          Hi folks, 
I have a simple process that does a query and uses CFCONTENT to output a CFTABLE to a content type of "application/msexcel".  Now this works fine 90% of the time.  But I can reproduce a problem where it doesn't quite work as expected, when querying certain records. When this works,  the user gets the file downloaded to them and they open it and they see their data.  But with certain query results, the excel file opens and appears to be blank, but if you scroll down to like line 2000 you will see the embeddded HTML output for the CFTABLE with all the data.  Like this:
<table border><tr><th>ID</th>.....
That's in the Excel file in place of just the outputed data.
Because I can reproduce it with the same query over and over, I know it's likely something in the data like an extra quote or something like that, which is throwing off CFCONTENT.   Now, I can't control the data so I'm looking for suggestions for how I can wrap the data inside a CF Tag to preserve the output.
Any ideas?  I don't have access to CF9/10 or I would explore CFSPREADSHEET.  I have CF8.  Thanks
My code is quite simple, basically like this:
<cfcontent type="application/msexcel">
<cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="filename=Export.xls">
<cfquery datasource="#DS#" name="Getdata">
select * from tablewhere practiceid = #practiceID#
order byName
</cfquery>
<cftable query="getdata" htmltable="yes" colheaders="Yes" border="yes">
<cfcol header="ID" text="#ID#">
<cfcol header="First Name" text="#firstname#">

Answer 1

Next time you encounter this, bear in mind that all <cfcontent> does in this case is to set the HTTP response MIME type header, which gives the browser guidance as to how to handle the data it receives.  It does not transform the data in any way.  So if you're using <cftable> (why?  Oh why?) then your're sending HTML and telling the browser it's XLS data.  Leaving it up to Excel to make sense of it (which it will kinda do, if the HTML it tidy).
If you are getting unexpected results, just do what you'd - hopefully - normally do: look at the data you're sending back to the browser, and try to work out where it's going wrong.  I presume in this case there was a tonne of white space generated by <cftable> for some reason.
In general if you want to set the MIME type for the response, get the data you want to send back ready (ie: put it in a variable), then call <cfcontent> with both the TYPE and the RESET attribute, then output the data.  This will mitigate some (although not all) of whitespace CFML churns out as part of "doing business", leaving only the data you actually want in the output buffer.
Adam