Freemarker Loop to write tables - email

Question

This is for email coding.
Seems simple in my head, but I have assigned a set of data to a freemarker variable
[#assign LOOP_TAB]${list.creative!'000000'}[/#assign]
Where list.creative contains either 1-5
I then want to write the correspsonding amount of simple HTML tables to my template
<!--Begin TEXT BOX-->
[#list 0..LOOP_TAB?length-1 as i]
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="left" valign="top" style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 20px; color: #000000;"><br>Loop Table Structure.<br><br></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>[/#list]
Its sort of working, but im getting two tables by default, and never teh right amount of tables when i test on 2, or 4, or 1

Answer 1

Let me rename LOOP_TAB to numberOfTabs. So, if that's a number, and not a string, then:
[#list 1 ..< numberOfTabs!0 as _]
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
...
</table>
[/#list]
If numberOfTabs is a string, and you can't fix the data-model, then use (numberOfTabs?number)!0 instead of numberOfTabs!0.
Some further notes:
[#assign LOOP_TAB]${list.creative!'000000'}[/#assign] can be simply written as [#assign LOOP_TAB = list.creative!'000000']. But you don't need this at all, as you have seen.
?length gives the length of the strings in characters, so, it has returned the length of the string in LOOP_TABS.
from .. to gives an inclusive range, furthermore 0 .. -1 will give [0, -1], instead of the empty sequence that you wanted. Therefore you need from ..< to, which has exclusive end.
I used _ as loop variable only to signify that you don't actually read it anywhere. It's not special otherwise.