A Macromedia ColdFusion application for an international user audience can incorporate several languages; the application can dynamically determine the language and numberic formatting to display to a user. To accept and render internationalized content correctly, an application requires appropriate locale variable, character sets, and character encodings. This article explains these elements, and how to use CFML tags and functions to specify the character encoding and language of input and output data in an application and a web browser.

You can download example ColdFusion MX pages that show how to use the tags, functions, and options discussed in this article.

Download the internationalization_cfmx.zip file on any operating system.

When the file decompresses, a folder named internationalization_example_pages is created on your system.

If you have trouble downloading or decompressing the files, see TechNote 13686.

To display the example CFML code, open the example pages in a text editor or a ColdFusion editor such as Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. To execute the example CFML code, copy the files to an appropriate location and open the pages in a browser with ColdFusion MX server running.

About locales

Character encoding

Internationalization tags and functions

Internationalized application development tips

Procedures and example code

Information resources

Wayne Pozzar Wayne Pozzar is an International QA Engineer on the ColdFusion team. Christina Lamkin Christina Lamkin is a senior technical writer on the ColdFusion team. 15 July 2002 ColdFusion MX, internationalization, i18n, character encoding, language, locale, localization, UTF-8, country, Java, format, Windows, byte-order mark, BOM, cfprocessingdirective tag, setEncoding function, cfcontent tag, Form variable, URL variable, character set, charset, ASCII, time, date, currency, action page, application.cfm, LSCurrency format function, setLocale function, CFX, tutorial 9945