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DEVELOPING COLDFUSION 9 APPLICATIONS
Developing CFML Applications
By default, ColdFusion uses UTF-8 to represent text data sent to a browser. UTF-8 represents the Unicode character
set using a variable-length encoding. ASCII characters are sent using a single byte. Most European and Middle Eastern
characters are sent as 2 bytes, and Japanese, Korean, and Chinese characters are sent as 3 bytes. One advantage of UTF-
8 is that it sends ASCII character set data in a form that is recognized by systems designed to process only single-byte
ASCII characters, while it is flexible enough to handle multiple-byte character representations.
While the default format of text data returned by ColdFusion is UTF-8, you can have ColdFusion return a page to any
character set supported by Java. For example, you can return text using the Japanese language Shift-JIS character set.
Similarly, ColdFusion can handle data that is in many different character sets. For more information, see
the page encoding of server
output" on page 371.
Character encoding conversion issues
Because different character encodings support different character sets, you can encounter errors if your application
gets text in one encoding and presents it in another encoding. For example, the Windows Latin-1 character encoding,
Windows-1252, includes characters with hexadecimal representations in the range 80-9F, while ISO 8859-1 does not
include characters in that range. As a result, under the following circumstances, characters in the range 80-9F, such as
the euro symbol (Ä), are not displayed properly:
• A file encoded in Windows-1252 includes characters in the range 80-9F.
• ColdFusion reads the file, specifying the Windows-1252 encoding in the
• ColdFusion displays the file contents, specifying ISO-8859 in the
Similar issues can arise if you convert between other character encodings; for example, if you read files encoded in the
Japanese Windows default encoding and display them using Shift-JIS. To prevent these problems, ensure that the
display encoding is the same as the input encoding.
Locales
A locale identifies the exact language and cultural settings to use for a user. The locale controls how to format the
following:
• Dates
• Times
• Numbers
• Currency amounts
ColdFusion supports all locales supported by the JVM that it uses.
Note: Current JVM versions (through 1.4.2) do not support localized numbers such as Arabic-hindic numbers used in
Arabic locales or hindic digits used in Hindi locales. ColdFusion uses Arabic numbers in all locales.
Locale names
ColdFusion supports two formats for specifying locale names: the standard Java locale names and the ColdFusion
naming convention that was required through ColdFusion 6.1.
• You can specify all locales using a name consisting of the following:
• Two lowercase letters to identify the language; for example, en for English, or zh for Chinese.
• Optionally, an underscore and two uppercase letters to identify the regional variant of the language; for example,
US for the United States, or HK for Hong Kong.
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Last updated 8/5/2010
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