character é shows as ?

[Guest]

I have a database full of the word "Café" and coldfusion will output the é fine on a webpage or using cfdump or simply cfoutput. However when I try and write to a txt file using cffile it replaces it with "?".  (code below)

This also occcurs when I read a txt file and output the results using cffile. It is my opinion he cffile is the culprit here. Any thoughts on this?

<cfquery name="get_all" datasource="#dsn#">

select * from malls where fkmasterid=1

</cfquery>

  <cfloop query="get_all">

    <cfquery name="get_b" datasource="mbi_2">

SELECT lt_ben_cat.benefit_cat, benefits.name, benefits.link, benefits.address_line1, benefits.phone, benefits.restaurant_number, benefits.county, benefits.city, benefits.state, benefits.ZIP, benefits.valid

FROM benefits INNER JOIN

lt_ben_cat ON benefits.benefit_type = lt_ben_cat.initial

WHERE  benefits.website_pull LIKE '%#accesskey#%' ORDER BY lt_ben_cat.benefit_cat, benefits.name

</cfquery>

    <cfsavecontent variable="myvar">

    <cfoutput>Type#chr(9)#Name#chr(9)#Website#chr(9)#Address#chr(9)#Phone#chr(9)#MemberCard#chr(35)##chr(9)#Region#chr(9)#City#chr(9)#State#chr(9)#Zip Code#chr(9)#Valid</cfoutput>

    <cfloop query="get_b">

      <cfoutput>#get_b.benefit_cat##chr(9)##get_b.name##chr(9)##get_b.link##chr(9)##get_b.address_line1##chr(9)##get_b.phone##chr(9)##get_b.restaurant_number##chr(9)##get_b.county##chr(9)##get_b.city##chr(9)##get_b.state##chr(9)##get_b.ZIP##chr(9)##get_b.valid#</cfoutput>

    </cfloop>

    </cfsavecontent>

    <cffile action="write" file="/home/membercard/#get_all.malldir#/benefit_list.txt" output="#myvar#">

  </cfloop>

When I try and import it

[Joshua_Cyr]

When you see an issue like that it is usually that diferent parts of the

system are not of the same characterset. Most likely the db is UTF-8 and

the file written is latin-1 or something like that.

Try in your CFfile to specify charset="utf-8".

[Guest · Accepted solution]

Thanks Joshua. You got me in the ballpark on that one. I used the charset="iso-8859-1" and that gave me the "é" but now I see there is "?" for the character "☼"

I may have to do a replace on that one. I have no idea what character set supports that symbol.

[Joshua_Cyr]

If you can find out what char set the db is, that should put you right.

Also your html may specify a charset at the top of the page, and that

should help as well as they seem to appear correctly on the page.

[Guest]

I used a replace to handle the "☼" character and replaced it with "¤" (close enough for me)

Thanks for your help Joshua