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CharsetEncode

Last update:
May 18, 2026

Description

Uses the specified encoding to convert binary data to a string.

Returns

A string representation of the binary object.

Category

Function syntax

CharsetEncode(binary, encoding)

See also

BinaryDecodeBinaryEncode, CharsetDecode; Determining the page encoding of server output in Processing a request in ColdFusion in the Developing ColdFusion Applications

History

ColdFusion (2018 release): Introduced named parameters.
ColdFusion MX 7: Added this function.

Parameters

Parameter
Description
binary
A variable containing binary data to decode into text.
encoding
The character encoding that was used to encode the string into binary format. It must be a character encoding name recognized by the Java runtime. The following list includes commonly used values:

Usage

Adobe recommends that you use this function, and not the ToString function, to convert binary data to strings in all new applications.

Example

The following example uses the CharsetDecode function to convert a string to a binary object, and uses the CharsetEncode function to convert it back to the original value. You can change the character encoding that ColdFusion uses for the conversion.
If you select the Asian language encodings, characters that are not in the specified character set are successfully converted.
<h3>Character Encoding Conversion Example</h3> 

<!--- Do the conversions. --->
<cfscript> 
myString="Hello ColdFusion"
charEncoding="windows-1252"
chardecode=CharsetDecode(myString, charEncoding); 
charencode=CharsetEncode(chardecode, charEncoding); 
</cfscript> 
 
<!--- Display the input values and results. --->
<cfoutput> 
<h3>Parameter Settings</h3> 
<p><b>The string:</b> 
#myString#</p> 
<p><b>The character encoding:</b> #charEncoding#</p> 
 
<h3>Results of the operations:</h3> 
<p><b>Dump of the string converted to a binary object by CharsetDecode: 
</b> 
<cfdump var="#chardecode#"></p> 
<p><b>The binary object converted back to a string by CharsetEncode: 
</b> 
#charencode#</p> 
</cfoutput>

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