User Guide

272 Chapter 2: ColdFusion Tags
Attributes
Usage
The cfprocssingdirective tag has limitations that depend on the attribute you use. For this
reason, Macromedia recommends that you include either the
pageencoding or
suppresswhitespace attribute in a cfprocessingdirective tag, not both. To specify both
values, use separate tags.
If you use the
pageEncoding attribute, the following rules apply:
• You must put the tag within the first 4096 bytes of a page. It can be positioned after a
cfsetting or cfsilent tag.
• If you use the tag on a page that includes other pages by using the cfinclude or cfmodule
tags, custom tag invocation, and so on, the tag has no effect on the included pages.
• You cannot embed the tag within conditional logic, because the pageEncoding attribute is
evaluated when ColdFusion compiles a page (not when it executes the page). For example, the
following code has no effect at execution time, because the
cfprocessingdirective tag has
already been evaluated:
<cfif dynEncoding is not "dynamic encoding is not possible">
<cfprocessingdirective pageencoding=#dynEncoding#>
</cfif>
• If you have multiple cfprocessingdirective tags in one page that specify the pageEncoding
attribute, they must all specify the same value; if not, ColdFusion throws an error.
• If you specify only the pageencoding attribute, do not use a separate end tag.
• ColdFusion accepts character encoding names that are supported by the Java platform. If an
invalid name is specified, ColdFusion throws an InvalidEncodingSpecification exception.
Attribute Req/Opt Default Description
suppressWhiteSpace Optional Boolean; whether to suppress white space
characters within the
cfprocessingdirective block
that are generated by CFML tags and often do not
affect HTML appearance. Does not affect any
white space in HTML code.
pageEncoding Optional Character
encoding
identified by
the page
byte order
mark, if any;
otherwise,
system
default
encoding
A string literal; cannot be a variable. Identifies the
character encoding of the current CFML page. This
attribute affects the entire page, not just the
cfprocessing tag body. The value may be enclosed
in single or double quotation marks, or none.
The following list includes commonly used values::
• utf-8
• iso-8859-1
• windows-1252
• us-ascii
• shift_jis
• iso-2022-jp
• euc-jp
• euc-kr
• big5
• euc-cn
• utf-16
For more information on character encodings, see:
www.w3.org/International/O-charset.html.