I have a client who inserted some Arabic text into SQL Server database column. Now the text displays as ????? only.
I know that this is related to collation and that he should have modified the collation of SQL Server before entering his data. Also I know that he should have used nVarchar, instead of Varchar in his column.
How can I retrieve the data entered in his column or convert it into Arabic from ???? since the data is already entered and we need to convert it.
Thanks in advance.
Here are some basic rules which you may want to keep in mind. While storing Unicode data, the column must be of Unicode data type (nchar, nvarchar, ntext). Another rule is that the value must be prefixed with N while insertion like the below.
INSERT INTO TBL_LANG VALUES ('English',N'I am American')
INSERT INTO TBL_LANG VALUES ('Tamil',N'நான் தமிழன்')
If the data inserted in the correct manner, then you will get the correct response.
As well have a look at the link.
Convert “???? ??????” in to arabic language
Related
My source SQL database contains Arabic characters and the column is an Xml data type. I am trying to get the data flown from source sql to destination sql db. However, when the data flow happens, the column which contains Arabic characters turns into gibberish (unrecognizable characters - not question marks).
How do I transition data correct from the source table to destination table. I have tried using Collate Arabic_CI_AI_KS_WS and used data conversion to add NTEXT and it's still not working.
Appreciate any leads to the direction in resolving this issue.
Thank you
I have a column which was set to Varchar and the database set to SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS.
When a user entered their name into our web front end and save the data, it was not saving accented characters correctly.
The web user was entering the following, "Béala" but this was being saved on the database as the following, "Béala".
I believe that changing the column from Varchar to NVarchar should prevent this from happening going forward(?), however, I have two questions.
1) How do I perform a select on the existing data in the column and display it correctly?
select CONVERT(NVARCHAR(100),strAddress1) from [dbo].[tblCustomer]
This still shows the data incorrectly.
2) How do I update the data in the column once converted to NVarchar to save the accented characters correctly?
Many thanks,
Ray.
The only idea that came to my mind is that you have to prepare an update that will fool this badly loaded data, i.e. a sign
'é' will always match exactly one character (in this case 'é'), you have to catch all special characters and this
as have been changed (just a simple update with cases and replace). Of course, the first column must be of the nvarchar type.
It solves the problem 1 and 2 (the data will be correct in the table, the data will be displayed correctly, I described the update above)
Here is way to get it in normal characters scheme.
select 'Réunion', cast('Réunion' as varchar(100)) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1253_CI_AI
Moreover to check all possible collations in SQL Server you can try this query
SELECT name, description
FROM sys.fn_helpcollations();
I have a database imported that contains Arabic characters but are displayed as question marks. Through some searching I found that the column data types should be nvarchar to support unicode (they were varchar). I changed one of the columns that contains those characters to nvarchar but the data is still displayed as "??". How can I change the existing values to become unicode and display correctly?
You cannot just simply change the datatype to nvarchar - that won't bring back the data since it's already been "destroyed" by having been converted to a non-Unicode format.
You need to use nvarchar and then you need to insert (or update) the data in such a way that doesn't convert it back to ANSI codes.
If you use T-SQL to insert that Unicode code, make sure to use the N'...' prefix:
INSERT INTO dbo.YourTable(NvarcharCol)
VALUES (N'nvarchar-value')
From a front-end language like C# or PHP or Ruby, make sure to use Unicode strings - .NET (C# and VB.NET) does that automatically. When using queries with parameters, make sure to specify Unicode string types for those relevant parameters.
You need different collation.
Read more here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143508.aspx
I googled but failed to find an answer for the following question.
I have a DB2 database column of datatype “Char(100) for BIT Data“. It stores encrypted value of employee ID. I need to store this data in SQL Server.
What should be the datatype for this column in SQL Server?
Is there any formatting needed before inserting into SQL Server?
The column in your DB2 table is an ordinary character string, except that the for BIT Data part tells DB2 to treat that string as arbitrary binary data, rather than text. This matters mainly for sorts and comparisons. DB2 (as normally configured) would sort and compare strings alphabetically. A capital A would come before a lowercase b. But for BIT Data strings are compared by the underlying numeric value of the characters. Capital A would come after lowercase z.
In SQL server, there is a BINARY datatype for this, so you would probably use BINARY(100). No formatting should be necessary, as you probably want the value of raw binary data to stay exactly the same.
I have a database in SQL Server containing a column which needs to contain Unicode data (it contains user's addresses from all over the world e.g. القاهرة for Cairo)
This column is an nvarchar column with a collation of database default (Latin1_General_CI_AS), but I've noticed data inserted into it via SQL statements containing non English characters and displays as ?????.
The solution seems to be that I wasn't using the n prefix e.g.
INSERT INTO table (address) VALUES ('القاهرة')
Instead of:
INSERT INTO table (address) VALUES (n'القاهرة')
I was under the impression that Unicode would automatically be converted for nvarchar columns and I didn't need this prefix, but this appears to be incorrect.
The problem is I still have some data in this column which appears as ????? in SQL Server Management Studio and I don't know what it is!
Is the data still there but in an incorrect character encoding preventing it from displaying but still salvageable (and if so how can I recover it?), or is it gone for good?
Thanks,
Tom
To find out what SQL Server really stores, use
SELECT CONVERT(VARBINARY(MAX), 'some text')
I just tried this with umlauted characters and Arabic (copied from Wikipedia, I have no idea) both as plain strings and as N'' Unicode strings.
The results are that Arabic non-Unicode strings really end up as question marks (0x3F) in the conversion to VARCHAR.
SSMS sometimes won't display all characters, I just tried what you had and it worked for me, copy and paste it into Word and it might display it corectly
Usually if SSMS can't display it it should be boxes not ?
Try to write a small client that will retrieve these data to a file or web page. Check ALL your code if there are no other inserts or updates that might convertthe data to varchar before storing them in tables.