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Telemedianer - 30 Dec 2005 09:35 GMT

hi,

I am migrating several cf5 applications to CFMX7 (Std). All the content is in
french, german and english. The files are not stored in UTF8 but i guess in
ISO-8859-1 or Cp1252 (we were using mainly windows editors mostly CF Studio to
create the files). Pages which use non ASCII characters are not displayed
propperly becasue CFMX opens the files as UTF-8.

I got a hint, that i can set <cfprocessingdirective
pageencoding="ISO-8859-1"/> to correct that. The problem with the above is,
that i would have to do this for every file since the application runs trough a
single index.cfm and calls a lot of additional content via <cfinclude ...> or
mostly trough <cfmodule ...>. Changing all files is at the moment is
impossible, since more than one person is developing on this server and there
are also 3rd party applications running.

is there a way i could set coldfusion to to treat all files as iso-8859-1
instead of utf-8 by default ? i have tried to pass "-Dfile.encoding=ISO8859_1"
as option to the JVM (cfadmin > JVM Settings). without luck, after restarting
CFMX7 i get thefollowing error:

Title: JRun Servlet Error

500

java.lang.NullPointerException
    at jrun.servlet.JRunRequestDispatcher.invoke(JRunRequestDispatcher.java:258)
    at jrun.servlet.ServletEngineService.dispatch(ServletEngineService.java:541)
    at
jrun.servlet.jrpp.JRunProxyService.invokeRunnable(JRunProxyService.java:204)
    at
jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$DownstreamMetrics.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:320)
    at
jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$ThreadThrottle.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:428)
    at
jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$UpstreamMetrics.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:266)
    at jrunx.scheduler.WorkerThread.run(WorkerThread.java:66)

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PaulH *TMM* - 30 Dec 2005 10:25 GMT

> ISO-8859-1 or Cp1252 (we were using mainly windows editors mostly CF
> Studio to create the files). Pages which use non ASCII characters are
> not displayed

first off those are not the same encoding. the windows codepage is more
like a superset of latin-1 (iso-8859-1). so you really need to know
which encoding was used on those files.

> propperly becasue CFMX opens the files as UTF-8.

no, cf opens files in the server's default encoding. it "displays" them
in it's default encoding, utf-8.

> I got a hint, that i can set <cfprocessingdirective
> pageencoding="ISO-8859-1"/> to correct that. The problem with the
> above is, that i would have to do this for every file since the
> application runs trough a single index.cfm and calls a lot of
> additional content via <cfinclude ...> or mostly trough <cfmodule
> ...>. Changing all files is at the moment is

make it a good practice from now on. in any case, you can force your cf
server to use a different character encoding for HTTP from its default
(UTF-8) by changing the defaultCharset value in
cf_root/lib/neo-runtime.xml file:

<var name='defaultCharset'><string>UTF-8</string></var>

again the issue is which encoding to substitute for utf-8. frankly,
given the multilingual nature of your app you might want to convert your
pages' encoding to utf-8 & use that from now on. it wlll be less painul
in the long run (especially when somebody starts asking for non-latin-1
charsets). there are a couple of tools to do this in mass around (like
unifier).

you might want to read thru this:
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/globalize.html

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Telemedianer - 30 Dec 2005 10:49 GMT

Paul,

thanks again for your response, you are quick! About the currently used
codepage; i do not know how to detect it, i have tried to use the file utility
on this server, but it returns the mime-type (as expected) but no codepage info
however, any idea ? We have used cfstudio on windows, so i guess it's rather
"Cp1252 " than iso-8859-1, however i guess this doesn't matter much, since
except the "Umlaute (??? ???? should be in Cp1252 and iso-8859-1)" all
characters should be coded as html entities.

The server's default encoding seems to be utf-8, that is what the jvm settings
overview in cf admin says. Unfortunately i do not know how to change it under
linux so that the JVM will detect it propperly, that is why i have tried to
change it via java parameter (-Dxxx=xxx).

I would really like to find a setting to change this globally, because i do
not want to put to much effort into this transition from cf5 to cfmx7 (we are
moving away from cf, since it doesn't fit the needs of the customer anymore).

i have changed the cf_root/lib/neo-runtime.xml file, it didn't change
anything. trough google i found some other linux users with the saame problem
(changing the neo-runtime.xml file on windows seems to work, on linux it has no
effect in 7.01).

Cheers,
-S

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Telemedianer - 30 Dec 2005 13:14 GMT

hi, i got it working:
<var name='defaultCharset'><string>ISO8859_1</string></var> (the java
implementation does not like the notation: "iso8859-1").

What i see is that the response header now has the iso-8859-1 charset by
default. this is great and can also be done in Application.cfm with a <cfheader
...>

The remaining problem seems to be that files are still opened as if they were
utf-8, special characters are sent as "?" to the client.

in "cfadmin > server setings > Setting Summary" under "JVM Details" there is
an entry:
Java File Encoding : UTF8

i think if it would be possible to change this, it would solve my problem but
i do not know how. i have tried to pass "-Dfile.encoding=ISO8859_1" to the JVM
which (after a restart of the cf service) results in the bove posted error.

some help ... anyone ?

Cheers,
Simon

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Telemedianer - 30 Dec 2005 13:58 GMT

i found the following temporary solution (there are several thousand of cfm
files + another bunch of html/txt files using iso-8859-1). as mentioned this
doesn't solve my problem becasue user continue to contribute documents in
iso-8859-1 but to get a start you may do the following in a bash/sh:

$ export ext="cfm"
$ find ./ -name "*.${ext}" -exec iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 {} -o {}.new \;
$ find ./ -name "*.${ext}" -exec mv {} {}.old \;
$ for f in `find ./ -name "*.${ext}.new"`; do mv $f `echo $f | sed -e
's/\.new//'`; done

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Webmaster Forum / ColdFusion / Getting Started / December 2005

-Dfile.encoding=ISO8859_1