# cfprocessingdirective

Provides the following information to CFML on how to process the current page:

 * Specifies whether to remove excess whitespace character from
 CFML generated content in the tag body.
 * Identifies the character encoding (character set) of the page
 contents.




### Syntax

```
<cfprocessingdirective> 
```



#### Script Syntax ACF11+, Lucee

```
cfprocessingdirective();
```





## Attribute Reference

| Name | Type | Required | Default | Description | Values |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| suppressWhitespace | boolean | No |  | Boolean; whether to suppress white space characters within<br /> the cfprocessingdirective block that are generated by CFML<br /> tags and often do not affect HTML appearance. Does not<br /> affect any white space in HTML code. | true,false |
| pageEncoding | string | No |  | A string literal; cannot be a variable. Identifies the<br /> character encoding of the current CFML page. This attribute<br /> affects the entire page, not just the cfprocessing tag body.<br /> The value may be enclosed in single or double quotation<br /> marks, or none.<br /><br /> For more information on character encodings, see:<br /> www.w3.org/International/O-charset.html. | utf-8,iso-8859-1,windows-1252,us-ascii,shift_jis,iso-2022-jp,euc-jp,euc-kr,big5,euc-cn,utf-16 |





## CFML Engine Support

The cfprocessingdirective tag is supported on the following CFML engines:

| Engine | Minimum Version | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| ColdFusion | 4.5 | Not currently implemented in script CF11 / CF2016 (bug 3712167) |
| Lucee |  |  |
| BoxLang | 1.0.0 | `<bx:processingdirective>` in BoxLang |






## Related Tags and Functions

[cfsetting](https://cfdocs.org/cfsetting.md)




The human version of this document can be found here: [https://cfdocs.org/cfprocessingdirective](https://cfdocs.org/cfprocessingdirective) which is part of the cfdocs.org repository. Project created by [Pete Freitag](https://www.petefreitag.com) and sponsored by [Foundeo Inc.](https://foundeo.com/)