helpful...
I think some of the confusion about encoding is because it is not always
clear that there are two separate conversions which happen when CFMX
processes a template:
* conversion #1 - The template file is read and converted into 16bit
Unicode (UTF-16LE on "little-endian" machines like Intel. UTF16-BE on
"big-endian" machines like Sun)
... the template is processed by ColdFusion MX ...
* conversion #2 - The response to the browser is converted from 16bit
Unicode into the desired response encoding as it is sent.
These two conversions are independent.
For example, if a template is encoded as Cp1254 (Windows Turkish), this
does not mean that the response to the browser will be encoded with Cp1254,
or that the header sent to the browser will indicate that the encoding is
Turkish - "Content-Type: text/html; charset=Cp1254".
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
- Regarding conversion #1
CFMX assumes that the encoding for a template is the user's local default
encoding per the operating system settings.
The encoding of a template may be explicitly specified to CFMX in one of two
ways:
1. With a BOM at the start of the file. A BOM is a few non-printing bytes
before the first character of the file, which indicate how the file is
encoded.
2. using the <cfprocessingdirective pageencoding="encoding"> tag at the
start of the template.
Neither of these actually change anything in the template - they just inform
CFMX about how the template was encoded so CFMX can translate the template
into Unicode. If the template is specified to be a certain encoding, the
user must be sure that the template was indeed encoded that way - or CFMX
will be fooled into making incorrect conversions as it reads the template.
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
- Regarding conversion #2
By default, CFMX converts the 16bit Unicode which it uses internally into
UTF-8 encoding for sending responses. CFMX does this regardless of which
encoding the template originally had. This should be appropriate for most
(all?) responses, since UTF-8 can express all characters in all languages.
UTF-8 is supported by most (all?) browsers.
If you need to send the response in a different encoding, this can be done
with the <cfcontent> tag. For example - if you wanted the response to go
out as UTF-16LE, you could use: <cfcontent type="text/html;
charset=UTF-16LE">. Of course, if you choose an unconventional encoding
(like UTF-16LE) you should make sure your browser can handle it correctly.
One note about using the <cfcontent> tag this way - there can be no spaces
in the charset=xxxxx part of the type attribute. If you put a space before
or after the equals sign, it will not work.
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
The list of encodings supported by Java 1.3.1 (and hence, by CFMX
standalone) is at
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/guide/intl/encoding.doc.html We supply
the i18n.jar file with CFMX, so both the short and the long lists of
encodings here are available to CFMX.
The three BOM characters which are recognized by CFMX are:
Name Hex Values
---------------------- -----------------
UTF8_BOM EF BB BF
UTF16LE_BOM FF FE
UTF16BE_BOM FE FF
About template files with 16bit character sets:
If a template file uses a 16bit version of Unicode, it should have a BOM.
If it doesn't, and the encoding is specified as <cfprocessingdirective
pageencoding="UTF-16"> , this doesn't tell CFMX which "endian" machine the
file was created on.
If instead you used <cfprocessingdirective pageencoding="UTF-16LE"> or
<cfprocessingdirective pageencoding="UTF-16BE"> , CFMX could correctly
identify whether the "little" byte or the "big" byte comes first in each
two-byte character.
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