Contents > Developing ColdFusion MX Applications > Developing Globalized Applications > Handling data in ColdFusion MX > Input data from URLs and HTML forms Handling form data

Handling form data

The HTML form tag and the ColdFusion cfform tag let users enter text on a page, then submit that text to the server. The form tags are designed to work only with single-byte character data. Since ColdFusion uses two bytes per character when it stores strings, ColdFusion converts each byte of the form input into a two-byte representation.

However, if a user enters double-byte text into the form, the form interprets each byte as a single character, rather than recognize that each character is two bytes. This will corrupt the input text, as the following example shows:

1. A customer enters three double-byte characters in a form, represented by six bytes.
2. The form returns the six bytes to ColdFusion as six characters. ColdFusion converts them to a representation using two bytes per input byte for a total of twelve bytes.
3. Outputting these characters results in corrupt information displayed to the user.

To work around this issue, use the SetEncoding function to specify the character encoding of input form text. The SetEncoding function takes two parameters: the first specifies the variable scope and the second specifies the character encoding used by the scope. Since ColdFusion writes form parameters to the Form scope, you specify "Form" as the scope parameter to the function. If the input text is double-byte, ColdFusion preserves the two-byte representation of the text.

The following example specifies that the form data contains Korean characters:

<cfscript>
   setEncoding("FORM", "EUC-KR"); 
</cfscript>
<h1> Form Test Result </h1>
<strong>Form Values :</strong>

<cfset text = "String = #form.input1# , Length = #len(Trim(form.input1))#">
<cfoutput>#text#</cfoutput>

Contents > Developing ColdFusion MX Applications > Developing Globalized Applications > Handling data in ColdFusion MX > Input data from URLs and HTML forms Handling form data

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