User Guide

Introduction to globalization 405
How ColdFusion MX supports globalization
ColdFusion MX is implemented in Java. As a Java application, ColdFusion MX uses Java
globalization features. For example, ColdFusion MX 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 MX 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 upper-case 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 406.
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:
$100,000.00
while a locale of Portuguese (Brazilian) displays the currency as:
R$ 100.000
In order 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 408.