A few weeks ago I needed to modify a list to wrap each list element with single quotes. Normally you would do this when outputting the data in a view but in this case that was not an option.
I was about to write a function to to this when I decided to take a chance that someone had already written this for me. A quick google later and I discovered that ColdFusion has a builtin function for exactly this purpose named "listQualify()".
unqualifiedList = "dog,cat,bird,pig";
qualifiedList = listQualify(unqualifiedList, "'");
It seems even after all these years I am still learning new things about cfml.