User Guide

Table Of Contents
Locales 409
The Server.coldfusion.supportedlocales variable is a comma-delimited list of the locale
names that you can specify.
ColdFusion also includes a
GetLocaleDisplayName function that returns a locale name in a
format that is meaningful to users. It lets you display the locale using words in the user’s language;
for example, français (France).
Determining the locale
ColdFusion MX 7 determines the locale value as follows:
By default, ColdFusion uses the JVM locale, and the default JVM locale is the operating
system locale. You can set the JVM locale value explicitly in ColdFusion MX 7 in the JVM
Arguments field on the Java and JVM Settings page in the ColdFusion MX Administrator; for
example:
-Duser.language=de -Duser.region=DE.
A locale set using the SetLocale function persists for the current request or until it is reset by
another
SetLocale function in the request.
If a request has multiple SetLocale functions, the current locale setting affects how locale-
sensitive ColdFusion tags and functions (such as the functions that start with LS) format data.
The last
SetLocale function that ColdFusion processes before sending a response to the
requestor (typically the client browser) determines the value of the response
Content-
Language
HTTP header. The browser that requested the page displays the response according
to the rules for the language specified by the
Content-Language header.
ColdFusion ignores any SetLocale functions that follow a cfflush tag.
Using the locale
The
SetLocale function determines the default formats that ColdFusion uses to output date,
time, number, and currency values. You use the
GetLocale function to determine the current
locale setting of ColdFusion, or you can use the
GetLocaleDisplayName function to get the
locale name in a format that is meaningful to users. If you have not made a call to
SetLocale,
GetLocale returns the locale of the JVM.
The current locale has two effects:
When ColdFusion formats date, time, currency, or numeric output, it determines how to
format the output. You can change the locale multiple times on a ColdFusion page to format
information according to different locale conventions. This enables you to output a page that
properly formats different currency values, for example.
When ColdFusion returns a page to the client, it includes the HTTP Content-Language
header. ColdFusion uses the last locale setting on the page for this information.
Note: In earlier versions of ColdFusion, the default locale was always English, not the operating
system’s locale. For the Japanese version of ColdFusion, the default was Japanese.
The following example uses the LSCurrencyFormat function to output the value 100,000 in
monetary units for all the ColdFusion-supported locales. You can run this code to see how the
locale affects the data returned to a browser.