I stickied you one of our sites. We use gb2312 instead of utf-8, but I don't know how much difference that makes. I haven't checked in IE7, but it works in IE6.

Also try manually changing the encoding for the page in IE to see if that makes any difference.

Hello, I appreciate the help. Can you provide a link to one of your sites with a drop down menu listed with Chinese? Thanks.

Just noticed you've sent an email with an link to your site, thanks. I'll take a look at it. Thanks again.

Hi, I just tried saving the char-set and encoding the document as gb2312 instead of utf-8. Indeed, it worked in IE7. However, I tried changing the extension to a ColdFusion extension, cfm. It didn't work. The Chinese character displays fine in the Coldfusion page, but doesn't play it properly inside a select menu. Life, do you or anyone else have any experience with simplified Chinese/ColdFusion/select menu? Thanks.

That's exactly what that page is- Cold Fusion. (The file name & extension are just hidden because it's the default template.)

I suspect that you're probably using Cold Fusion MX or higher? We're still using CF 5 because of a host of problems with character encoding with MX.

Oh, and are you using standard HTML select tags or CFSELECT?

[edited by: LifeinAsia at 8:22 pm (utc) on July 15, 2008]

We're using ColdFusion 6.1. The drop down menu is using the HTML select tag.

Like I mentioned, MX (6) has some problems with character encoding. Not sure if it's been fixed with 7 or 8. Since it works with straight HTML, but breaks under CF rendering, I'd say that's where the problem lies.

As far as fixing it... Try downloading & installing an evaluation version of 7 or 8 and see if the page renders correctly. If so, upgrading may be your best bet. If that still doesn't work, I don't have any other suggestions, unless you wanted to downgrade to 5 (but then other aspects of your site might not work).

I've tried using cfcontent and cfprocessingdirective to set the charset for simplified Chinese (euc_cn = gb2312), however an error appeared stating: sun.io.ByteToCharEUC_CN.getIndex1()[S. Did a search on this error and seems like few people experienced this error before but didn't seem to have a solution to this. So what I did was install a language pack, and the Chinese characters appeared in the select menu under IE7. However, this is a local language pack install, so anyone viewing the Web page without this install won't beable to read the Chinese characters within the menu. By the way, after the install, it doesn't matter what the charset is set to within the meta tag, utf-8, gb2312, etc, the Chinese chars still appears.

What baffles me is that, with utf-8 set in the charset of the meta tag, it'll work in Firefox and majority of the other browsers with the exception of IE6.0+. I can set the charset to gb2312 and it still won't work under IE. This is displaying under a ColdFusion Web page. So, let's say there's an issue with CF MX 6.1 encoding International languages like Chinese. However, it'll appear fine in Firefox, but not IE. Wouldn't you say, there's an issue with IE as well?

That sounds likely. I never thought to check the issue in other browsers. But then again, I think that was back around the IE days of 5, which represented 90%+ of our visitors.