MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION MX 61-DEVELOPING COLDFUSION MX, Develop Manual

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374 Chapter 17: Developing Globalized Applications
A locale identifies the exact language and cultural settings for a user. The locale controls how dates
and currencies are formatted, how to display time, and how to display numeric data. For example,
the locale English (US) determines that a currency value displays as:
$100,000.00
while a locale of Portuguese (Brazilian) displays the currency as:
R$ 100.000
In order to correctly display date, time, currency, and numeric data to your customers, you must
know the customer’s locale. For more information on locales, see
“Locales” on page 376 .
About character encodings
A character encoding maps each character in a character set to a numeric value that can be
represented by a computer. These numbers can be represented by a single byte or multiple bytes.
For example, the ASCII encoding uses seven bits to represent the Latin alphabet, punctuation,
and control characters.
You use Japanese encodings, such as Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, and ISO-2022-JP, to represent Japanese
text. These encodings can vary slightly, but they include a common set of approximately 10,000
characters used in Japanese.
The following terms apply to character encodings:
•
SBCS
Single-byte character set; a character set encoded in one byte per character, such as
ASCII or ISO 8859-1.
•
DBCS
Double-byte character set; a method of encoding a character set in no more than two
bytes, such as Shift-JIS. Many character encoding schemes that are referred to as double-byte,
including Shift-JIS, allow mixing of single-byte and double-byte encoded characters. Others,
such as UCS-2, use two bytes for all characters.
•
MBCS Multiple-byte character set; a character set encoded with a variable number of bytes
per character, such as UTF-8.
The following table lists some common character encodings; however, there are many additional
character encodings that browsers and web servers support:
The World Wide Web Consortium maintains a list of all character encodings supported by the
Internet. You can find this information at www.w3.org/International/O-charset.html.
Encoding Type Description
ASCII SBCS 7-bit encoding used by English and Indonesian Bahasa languages
Latin-1
(ISO 8859-1) SBCS 8-bit encoding used for many Western European languages
Shift_JIS DBCS 16-bit Japanese encoding (Note that you must use an underscore
character (_), not a hyphen (-) in the name in CFML attributes.)
EUC-KR DBCS 16-bit Korean encoding
UCS-2 DBCS Two-byte Unicode encoding
UTF-8 MBCS Multibyte Unicode encoding. ASCII is 7-bit; non-ASCII characters used in
European and many Middle Eastern languages are two-byte; and most
Asian characters are three-byte