toString

Description

Converts a value to a string.

History

ColdFusion MX: Changed Unicode support: ColdFusion supports the Java UCS-2 representation of Unicode character values 0–65535. (ColdFusion 5 and earlier releases supported ASCII values 1–255.) Added the encoding parameter. Added ability to convert an XML document object to a string.

Syntax

ToString(value[, encoding])

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required	Default
encoding	The character encoding (character set) of the string. Optional for binary data, Generates an error if used for a simple value or XML document object. 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 For more information on character encoding, see: www.w3.org/International/O-charset.html. The default value is the encoding of the page on which the function is called. See cfcontent.
value	Value to convert to a string; can be a simple value such as an integer, a binary object, or an XML document object.

Returns

A string.

Usage

This function can convert simple values and binary values that do not contain Byte zero. If this function cannot convert a value, it throws an exception. This function can also convert an XML document object to a string XML representation.
Adobe recommends that you use the CharsetEncode function to convert binary data to a string.

Example

<h3>ToString Example</h3> 
<!---- Initialize data. ------> 
<cfset charData = ""> 
<!----- Create string of ASCII characters (32-255) and concatenate them. ----> 
<cfloop index = "data" from = "32" to = "255"> 
    <cfset ch = chr(data)> 
    <cfset charData = charData & ch> 
</cfloop> 
The following string is the concatenation of characters (32 to 255)  
    from the ASCII table.<br> 
<cfoutput>#charData#</cfoutput></p> 
 
<!------ Create a Base64 representation of this string. ----> 
<cfset data64 = toBase64(#charData#)> 
 
The following string is the Base64 representation of the string.<br> 
<cfoutput>#data64#</cfoutput></p> 
<!---- Create a binary representation of Base64 data. ---> 
<cfset dataBinary = toBinary(data64)> 
 
<!---- Create the string representation of the binary data. -----> 
<cfset dataString = ToString(dataBinary)> 
The following is the string representation of the binary data.<br> 
<cfoutput>#dataString#</cfoutput></p>

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