Data display issue in CF all non-IE browsers

Question

The message title was a bit vague for all the factors
involved here so let me explain the problem in detail.
We are running ColdFusion 7, we use Oracle 9i and the
datatype of the field we are having issues with is a LONG field.
The data we are displaying is part of an application that has
an essay field. When we insert the data from the essay into the
Oracle 9i DB i can query the DB and get the correct result in SQL+
and Golden. The results are being stored as ASCII in the LONG
field. In IE displaying this data in any way works fine. However in
Firefox, Seamonkey, Opera or any other non-IE browser I've tested,
when I try to display the data in a text area or a text input even
I get a string filled with □. Also if I even try to output
the contents of the field in a cfoutput I cannot even copy the
string correctly, I only get the first letter.
So if i put in the essay field "Hello world" when I revisit
that page to edit it, it would look something like this
"H□e□l□l□o□
W□o□r□l□d□." I brought this into
ultraedit so I could try converting to see what exactly this
character represents (I had to view source, save the file and open
the saved file since copy and pasting is made impossible by
whatever is going on), and apparently the □ is the null
character.
[Edited: I am getting the null character in FF not in IE]
I am not entirely sure why I am getting a null character in
FF and not IE but I thought it might have something to do with the
fact that ColdFusion defaults to UTF-8 and the value is being
stored as ASCII. This is strange first off because I am not telling
CF to store the value to ASCII anywhere so you would think it would
default as UTF-8. Secondly I tried to force the page to default to
ASCII to see if that fixed the problem with <cfcontent
type="text/html; charset=us-ascii"> this would read the page as
ASCII but for some reason that field still comes in as UTF-8.
Bugged Display in
FCK editor
Bugged firefox
source of above display
Has anyone ever seen or heard of anything like this? It only
seems to happen with the LONG datatype because we have no issues on
any fields except fields that are LONG.
Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Answer 1

Where does the data come from (FCK Editor, MS Word, other)?
This problem happens when I am using a text area, a text
input or FCK editor I submit the data via a form and allow the user
to edit it later if necessary using the same means (i.e. text
input, text area or FCKeditor). But this only occurs on fields that
insert to LONG datatypes. VARCHAR2's are working fine.
If you look at the data directly in the database does it look
fine?
Yes the data looks exactly as it should when I look at it in
the DB.
Have you tried something like this:
<cfprocessingdirective pageencoding="us-ascii">
Not yet, I will try that now and let you know how it works
What popped into my head was that somewhere the data is
double-byte
characters that are not using the second byte so it is null,
then later
on it is being interpreted as single-byte characters which is
exposing
the nulls.
I definately think this is the problem but I don't know
enough about encoding and how CF handles it to know how to fix the
problem.
I'll keep you all updated on my progress, thanks for the
suggestions thus far.
I have not tried