ToString

ToString(any_value[, encoding])

<h3>ToString Example</h3>
<!---- Initialize data. ------>
<cfset charData = "">
<!----- Create string of ASCII characters (32-255) and concatenate them. ---->
<cfloop index = "data" from = "32" to = "255">
   <cfset ch = chr(data)>
   <cfset charData = charData & ch>
</cfloop>
<p>The following string is the concatenation of characters (32 to 255) 
from the ASCII table.<br>
<cfoutput>#charData#</cfoutput></p>

<!------ Create a Base64 representation of this string. ---->
<cfset data64 = toBase64(#charData#)>
<p>
The following string is the Base64 representation of the string.<br>
<cfoutput>#data64#</cfoutput></p>
<!---- Create a binary representation of Base64 data. --->
<cfset dataBinary = toBinary(data64)>

<!---- Create the string representation of the binary data. ----->
<cfset dataString = ToString(dataBinary)>
<p>The following is the string representation of the binary data.<br>
<cfoutput>#dataString#</cfoutput></p>

Comments

halL said on Sep 5, 2003 at 2:25 PM :

The current version of the documentation is missing the following:

You can use the Encoding parameter only when you convert binary data to string data.
If you specify an encoding when you convert any other type of data to a string, ToString generates an error.

Explanation:
When converting binary data to a string, the internal conversion routine must know the original textual encoding of the data so that it can properly transform it to a ColdFusion (actually Java) internal string representation, which is encoded in UTF-16.
For example, if binary data represents ISO 8859-1 (8 bit) characters, the conversion routine must convert and expand each 8-bit byte into a 16-bit UTF-16 character,
whereas if the binary data represents UTF-16, no conversion is necessary (other than removing any byte order mark).
When converting non-binary data, the data format is already known, so specifying the original encoding is not appropriate

Iceborer said on Jun 17, 2004 at 8:17 AM :

When converting an XML document object using toString, I cannot specify encoding (apparently an XML Doc is not considered a binary object). Because of this I run into the following issue:

<cfset xml_string = toString (XMLDoc)>
<cffile action="write" file="myfile.xml" output="#xml_string#">

results in a file which has an XML header specifying UTF-8 enconding
(<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>)
in which all of the data is written in UTF-16

00000000h: FF FE 3C 00 3F 00 78 00 6D 00 6C 00 20 00 76 00 ; ÿþ<.?.x.m.l. .v.

If I can't specify an encoding when I toString an XML Doc, how do I fix this?

clinecorp said on Jun 25, 2004 at 5:51 PM :

when an XML object is dumped using toString(), all &apos; entity values are replaced with single quotes ('). This is undesirable behaviour as it creates a technically invalid XML document and confuses those trying to keep XML specific chars as entities within the database.

TacoBell said on Dec 16, 2004 at 2:31 PM :

When I call toStirng() on a valid XML document that contains
<link href="" rel="" />

it converts it to <link href="" rel="">
whats up with that? I did not tell it I wanted HTML..
I'm still trying to find a way to overcome this huge problem.