User Guide

Table Of Contents
412 Chapter 17: Developing Globalized Applications
Determining the page encoding of server output
Before ColdFusion can return a response to the client, it must determine the encoding to use for
the data in the response. By default, ColdFusion returns character data using the Unicode UTF-8
format.
ColdFusion pages (.cfm pages) default to using the Unicode UTF-8 format for the response, even
if you include the HTML
meta tag in the page. Therefore, the following example will not modify
the character set of the response:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html;
charset="Shift_JIS">
</head>
...
In this example, the response will still use the UTF-8 character set. Use the cfcontent tag to set
the output character set.
However, within a ColdFusion page you can use the
cfcontent tag to override the default
character encoding of the response. Use the
type attribute of the cfcontent tag to specify the
MIME type of the page output, including the character set, as follows:
<cfcontent type="text/html charset=EUC-JP">
Note: ColdFusion MX also provides attributes that let you specify the encoding of specific elements,
such as HTTP requests, request headers, files, and mail messages. For more information, see “Tags
and functions for controlling character encoding” on page 413 and “Handling data in
ColdFusion MX” on page 416.
The rest of this chapter describes ColdFusion tags and functions that you use for globalization,
and discusses specific globalization issues.