Adobe 38043740 - ColdFusion Standard - Mac Development Manual page 371

366
DEVELOPING COLDFUSION 9 APPLICATIONS
Developing CFML Applications
Your website can also accept customer feedback or some other form of text input. You might want to support that
feedback in multiple languages using a variety of character sets.
How ColdFusion supports globalization
ColdFusion is implemented in Java. As a Java application, ColdFusion uses Java globalization features. For example,
ColdFusion stores all strings internally using the Unicode character set. Because it uses Unicode, ColdFusion can
represent any text data from any language.
In addition, ColdFusion includes many tags and functions designed to support globalizing your applications. You can
use these tags and functions to set locales, convert date and currency formats, control the output encoding of
ColdFusion pages, and perform other actions.
Character sets, character encodings, and locales
When you discuss globalization issues, two topics that you must consider are the character sets or character encodings
recognized by the application and the locales for which the application must format data.
A character set is a collection of characters. For example, the Latin alphabet is the character set that you use to write
English, and it includes all of the lower- and uppercase letters from A to Z. A character set for French includes the
character set used by English, plus special characters such as "é," "à," and "ç."
The Japanese language uses three alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic
alphabets that each contain 46 characters plus two accents. Kanji contains Chinese ideographs adapted to the Japanese
language. The Japanese language uses a much larger character set than English because Japanese supports more than
10,000 different characters.
In order for a ColdFusion application to process text, the application must recognize the character set used by the text.
The character encoding maps between a character set definition and the digital codes used to represent the data.
In general use, the terms character set (or charset) and character encoding are often used interchangeably, and most
often a specific character encoding encodes one character set. However, this is not always true; for example, there are
multiple encodings of the Unicode character set. For more information on character encodings, see "About character
encodings" on page 366.
Note: ColdFusion uses the term charset to indicate character encoding in some attribute names, structure field keys, and
function parameter names.
A locale identifies the exact language and cultural settings for a user. The locale controls how dates and currencies are
formatted, how to display time, and how to display numeric data. For example, the locale English (US) determines that
a currency value displays as:
$100,000.00
while a locale of Portuguese (Portugese) displays the currency as:
R$ 100.000
To correctly display date, time, currency, and numeric data to your customers, you must know the customer's locale.
For more information on locales, see "Locales" on page 368.
About character encodings
A character encodingmaps each character in a character set to a numeric value that a computer can represent. These
numbers can be represented by a single byte or multiple bytes. For example, the ASCII encoding uses 7 bits to represent
the Latin alphabet, punctuation, and control characters.
Last updated 1/20/2012