Specifying a language

If you install the optional ColdFusion International Search pack, you can specify a language other than English when creating a collection.

ColdFusion supports Verity Locales in European, Asian, and Middle Eastern languages. For more information about installing Verity Locales, see Installing ColdFusion.

For English language support, Verity provides two options: English (Basic) and English (Advanced). The default language for Verity collections is English (Basic). Indexing a collection using English (Basic) is faster than using English (Advanced), however, English (Advanced) provides better search results.

Specify a language when you create the collection. The language you specify should match the language the documents were authored in. By specifying the language your documents are written in, Verity is able to correctly interpret accented characters, and, in many languages, use variations of word stems and roots. However, Verity does not support the following in Eastern European and Middle Eastern languages, including these languages in the Universal language pack:

  • Stemming

  • Normalization

  • Decomposition of compound words into subwords

  • Part of speech

  • Special number handling

If you have documents in several languages, create separate collections for each of them.

To specify a language when you are indexing data, select the language from the pop-up menu when you create a collection with the ColdFusion Administrator. In CFML, the cfcollection, cfindex, and cfsearch tags have an optional language attribute that you use to specify the language of the collection.

Use the following table to find the correct value for the language attribute for your collection. For example, the following code creates a collection for simplified Chinese:

<cfcollection action = "create" collection = "lei_01" 
path = "c:\CFusion\verity\collections" 
language = "simplified_chinese">

The following table lists the languages names and attributes that ColdFusion supports:

Language

Language attribute

Arabic

arabic

Chinese (simplified)

simplified_chinese

Chinese (traditional)

traditional_chinese

Czech

czech

Danish

danish

Dutch

dutch

English (Basic)

english

English (Advanced)

englishx

Finnish

finnish

French

french

German

german

Greek

greek

Hebrew

hebrew

Hungarian

hungarian

Italian

italian

Japanese

japanese

Korean

korean

Norwegian

norwegian

Norwegian (Bokmal)

bokmal

Norwegian (Nynorsk)

nynorsk

Polish

polish

Portuguese

portuguese

Russian

russian

Spanish

spanish

Swedish

swedish

Turkish

turkish

Multiple languages

uni

You can register collections in the ColdFusion Administrator or by creating a collection with the cfcollection tag. If you register a given collection with ColdFusion and you specify a language attribute, you do not have to specify the language attribute when using cfindex and cfsearch tags for that collection. If you do not register a given collection with ColdFusion, ColdFusion uses English (Basic), the default language, unless you specify the language in the language attribute for the cfindex and cfsearch tags for that collection.

Note: When you search a collection in a language other than English, translate operators such as AND and OR into the language of the collection.