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FileWrite

Last update:
May 18, 2026
Note:
You can find the CFFiddle demo of this function and other file functions as part of a project that is shared with you.
Click the button below to launch CFFiddle.
To copy the project in your workspace in CFFiddle, follow the steps below:
  1. Log in with your Gmail or Facebook credentials.
  2. Navigate to the project in the left pane.
  3. Once you make some changes in any cfm in the project, a pop up displays asking you to save the project.
  4. Give the project a suitable name and click Save.
  5. Create a folder named dir1 and upload a text file, myfile.txt.

Description

If you specify a file path, writes the entire content to the specified on-disk or in-memory file. If you specify a file object, writes text or binary data to the file object.

Category

System functions

Function syntax

FileWrite(file, data [, charset]) 
 
 OR 
 
 FileWrite(file, data)

See also

FileCopy, FileDelete, FileExists, FileMove, cffile

History

ColdFusion (2018 release) Update 5 and ColdFusion (2016 release) Update 12: Changed parameter name filePath to file.
ColdFusion (2018 release): Introduced named parameters.
ColdFusion 8: Added this function.

Parameters

Parameter
Description
charset
The character encoding in which the file contents is encoded. The following list includes commonly used values:
  • utf-8
  • iso-8859-1
  • windows-1252
  • us-ascii
  • shift_jis
  • {{iso-2022-jp }}
  • euc-jp
  • euc-kr
  • big5
  • euc-cn
  • utf-16 If the file starts with a byte order mark and you set this attribute to a conflicting character encoding, ColdFusion generates an error.
data
Content of the file or file object to create.
file
Name of the file object to write.
Pathname of the on-disk or in-memory file to write. If not an absolute path (starting with a drive letter and a colon, or a forward or backward slash), it is relative to the ColdFusion temporary directory, which is returned by the getTempDirectory function.

Usage

Use the following syntax to specify an in-memory file, which is not written to disk. In-memory files speed processing of transient data.
ram:///filepath
The filepath can include directories, for example ram:///petStore/images/poodle.jpg. Create the directories in the path before you specify the file. For more information on using in-memory files, see Working with in-memory files in the Developing ColdFusion Applications.
Example
<h3>FileWrite Example</h3> 
<!--- This example gets the email addresses of employees, ---> 
<!--- creates a file object that contains the e-mail addresses, ---> 
<!--- read the file object, and then creates a text file with a ---> 
<!--- list of e-mail addresses. ---> 
 
<cfquery name="getemployees" datasource="cfdocexamples"> 
SELECT EMAIL 
FROM Employees 
</cfquery> 
 
<cfset companymail = ""> 
 
<cfloop query = "getemployees"> 
<cfset companymail = companymail & #EMAIL# & ";" & " "> 
</cfloop> 
 
<cfscript> 
    FileWrite("mail_list", "#companymail#"); 
    mlist = FileRead("mail_list"); 
    FileWrite("c:\temp\mail_list.txt", "#mlist#"); 
</cfscript>
Example with named parameters
<cfscript> 
 myFile=GetDirectoryFromPath(GetCurrentTemplatePath()) & "file.txt" 
 FileWrite(file=myFile, data="Hello World!",charset= "UTF-8") 
</cfscript>

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