cfhttp and accentued characters

[tomtedeschi]

Hello-
I'm also having this problem. We're using ColdFusion MX 6.1 as a front-end to
a MySQL database. The database contains extended ASCII characters in one of its
text fields (for example, accented vowels). ColdFusion doesn't seem to display
these correctly however.

I've tried these CF tags as suggested in other posts:

<cfheader name="Content-Type" value="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<cfcontent type="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<cfprocessingdirective pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1">

as well as using a META content-type directive in the HTML-output portion of
my CF page:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

No luck. The extended characters display as question marks on CF output, but
display correctly when I look at the actual SQL data with PHPMyAdmin.

I'm not making a CFHTTP request, but rather outputting from a DB query, so I'm
guessing that CFHTTP won't help me?

The CF documentation leads me to believe that some settings might have to be
changed in the application.cfm file? (which we don't have access to,
unfortunately, since this is on a shared server). Any thoughts would be greatly
appreciated.

- Tom Tedeschi

[tomtedeschi]

Was able to answer my own question:

In CF-Admin, set the connectionstring for the MySQL database under "advanced
settings" to:

useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=ISO-8859-1

If you're on a shared host system, you might have to have a tech. support
person do this for you. Also, it's not necessary, but doesn't hurt to create an
Application.cfm file in the root directory of your CF application with the
following contents:

<cfapplication name="YOURAPPLICATIONNAMEHERE">
<cfcontent type="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<cfscript>
setencoding("form", "ISO-8859-1");
setencoding("url", "ISO-8859-1");
</cfscript>
<cfprocessingdirective pageencoding="iso-8859-1">

Replace YOURAPPLICATIONNAMEHERE with something else, of course...

:-)