Getting ? while bcp out data from sybase with umlaut character(¬) - sybase

I am trying to bcp out data from Sybase to .bcp file. while doing bcp (¬) character alone getting displayed as '?'. Any suggestion?

It could be that your bcp utility is not using the same charset as your database or the terminal. You may have to play with the bcp options that will to force the output to match what you need.
Here are the flags:
[-a display_charset]
[-z language]
[-J client_charset]
SAP/Sybase ASE Utility Guide: bcp
-a display_charset
allows you to run bcp from a terminal where the character set differs from that of the machine on which bcp is running. Use -a in
conjunction with -J to specify the character set translation file
(.xlt file) required for the conversion. Use -a without -J only if the
client character set is the same as the default character set.
-z language
is the official name of an alternate language the server uses to display bcp prompts and messages. Without the -z flag, bcp uses the
server’s default language.
You can add languages to an Adaptive Server during installation or afterwards, using either the langinstall utility (or langinst in
Windows) or the sp_addlanguage stored procedure.
-J client_charset
specifies the character set to use on the client. bcp uses a filter to convert input between client_charset and the Adaptive Server
character set.
-J client_charset requests that Adaptive Server convert to and from client_charset, the character set used on the client.
-J with no argument sets character set conversion to NULL. No conversion takes place. Use this if the client and server use the same
character set.
Omitting -J sets the character set to a default for the platform, which may not necessarily be the character set that the client is
using.
For more information about character sets and associated flags, see the System Administration Guide.

Related

Can I write a console program that works with multiple character encodings? [duplicate]

Now I change my gnome-terminal's character encoding to "GBK" (default it is UTF-8), but how can I get the value(character encoding) in my Linux?
The terminal uses environment variables to determine which character set to use, therefore you can determine it by looking at those variables:
echo $LC_CTYPE
or
echo $LANG
locale command with no arguments will print the values of all of the relevant environment variables except for LANGUAGE.
For current encoding:
locale charmap
For available locales:
locale -a
For available encodings:
locale -m
Check encoding and language:
$ echo $LC_CTYPE
ISO-8859-1
$ echo $LANG
pt_BR
Get all languages:
$ locale -a
Change to pt_PT.utf8:
$ export LC_ALL=pt_PT.utf8
$ export LANG="$LC_ALL"
If you have Python:
python -c "import sys; print(sys.stdout.encoding)"
To my knowledge, no.
Circumstantial indications from $LC_CTYPE, locale and such might seem alluring, but these are completely separated from the encoding the terminal application (actually an emulator) happens to be using when displaying characters on the screen.
They only way to detect encoding for sure is to output something only present in the encoding, e.g. ä, take a screenshot, analyze that image and check if the output character is correct.
So no, it's not possible, sadly.
To see the current locale information use locale command. Below is an example on RHEL 7.8
[usr#host ~]$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
Examination of https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html, the xterm control character documentation, shows that it follows the ISO 2022 standard for character set switching. In particular ESC % G selects UTF-8.
So to force the terminal to use UTF-8, this command would need to be sent. I find no way of querying which character set is currently in use, but there are ways of discovering if the terminal supports national replacement character sets.
However, from charsets(7), it doesn't look like GBK (or GB2312) is an encoding supported by ISO 2022 and xterm doesn't support it natively. So your best bet might be to use iconv to convert to UTF-8.
Further reading shows that a (significant) subset of GBK is EUC, which is a ISO2022 code, so ISO2022 capable terminals may be able to display GBK natively after all, but I can't find any mention of activating this programmatically, so the terminal's user interface would be the only recourse.

Copy table from txt file with Chinese Characters - Postgresql on Windows

I am trying to load a table from a txt file which has Chinese characters in it using the \copy command in PostgreSQL. I have a test table with only one columns Names Varchar(25) in it. When I run an insert statement from PSQL or PgAdmin like
insert into test values ('康狀態概');
it works and inserts the value correctly. When I put the same value in a txt file (say text.txt) and try to use the copy command and load the contents of test.txt
\copy test from 'D:/database/test.dat';
It throws an error ERROR: character with byte sequence 0xa6 0x82 in encoding "GBK" has no equivalent in encoding "UTF8" on WIndows only. I changed the locale and keyboard settings of the Windows server to Chinese BUT it does not work with or without changing the locale settings.
The same exercise works fine on Linux without any changes.
Can someone please suggest what needs to be done here?
Thanks

PostgreSQL - ECPG / C - host variable UTF-8 decoding

I have a UTF8 encoding database.
I am using ECPG - PROGRAM C.
When I get data recordset with EXEC SQL
EXEC SQL DECLARE cur_myTable CURSOR FOR
SELECT code,
label
INTO :hv_cod,
:hv_label
FROM myTable
but I print data in the pgc file,
printf("\n libellé => %s", :hv_label ), I get:
I get :
libellé => télé.
Is it possible to UTF8 decode a host variable to ISO-8859-1 in a program C ?
Is it possible to say in the .pgc file : Postgres I want UTF8-decode values ?
Thanks
Is it possible to UTF8 decode a host variable to ISO-8859-1 in a program C ?
Sure, lots of libraries do it. Look at libiconv for example.
Is it possible to say in the .pgc file : Postgres I want UTF8-decode values ?
Trivially. Set client_encoding to iso-8859-1 or whatever your local encoding is. You can do this with libpq functions; ecpg may have its own equivalents, not sure.

Strange Characters in database text: Ã, Ã, ¢, â‚ €,

I'm not certain when this first occured.
I have a new drop-shipping affiliate website, and receive an exported copy of the product catalog from the wholesaler. I format and import this into Prestashop 1.4.4.
The front end of the website contains combinations of strange characters inside product text: Ã, Ã, ¢, â‚ etc. They appear in place of common characters like , - : etc.
These characters are present in about 40% of the database tables, not just product specific tables like ps_product_lang.
Another website thread says this same problem occurs when the database connection string uses an incorrect character encoding type.
In /config/setting.inc, there is no character encoding string mentioned, just the MySQL Engine, which is set to InnoDB, which matches what I see in PHPMyAdmin.
I exported ps_product_lang, replaced all instances of these characters with correct characters, saved the CSV file in UTF-8 format, and reimported them using PHPMyAdmin, specifying UTF-8 as the language.
However, after doing a new search in PHPMyAdmin, I now have about 10 times as many instances of these bad characters in ps_product_lang than I started with.
If the problem is as simple as specifying the correct language attribute in the database connection string, where/how do I set this, and what to?
Incidently, I tried running this command in PHPMyAdmin mentioned in this thread, but the problem remains:
SET NAMES utf8
UPDATE: PHPMyAdmin says:
MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
This is the same character set I used in the last import file, which caused more character corruptions. UTF-8 was specified as the charset of the import file during the import process.
UPDATE2
Here is a sample:
people are truly living untetheredâ€ïâ€Â
Ã‚ï† buying and renting movies online, downloading software, and
sharing and storing files on the web.
UPDATE3
I ran an SQL command in PHPMyAdmin to display the character sets:
character_set_client utf8
character_set_connection utf8
character_set_database latin1
character_set_filesystem binary
character_set_results utf8
character_set_server latin1
character_set_system utf8
So, perhaps my database needs to be converted (or deleted and recreated) to UTF-8. Could this pose a problem if the MySQL server is latin1?
Can MySQL handle the translation of serving content as UTF8 but storing it as latin1? I don't think it can, as UTF8 is a superset of latin1. My web hosting support has not replied in 48 hours. Might be too hard for them.
If the charset of the tables is the same as it's content try to use mysql_set_charset('UTF8', $link_identifier). Note that MySQL uses UTF8 to specify the UTF-8 encoding instead of UTF-8 which is more common.
Check my other answer on a similar question too.
This is surely an encoding problem. You have a different encoding in your database and in your website and this fact is the cause of the problem. Also if you ran that command you have to change the records that are already in your tables to convert those character in UTF-8.
Update: Based on your last comment, the core of the problem is that you have a database and a data source (the CSV file) which use different encoding. Hence you can convert your database in UTF-8 or, at least, when you get the data that are in the CSV, you have to convert them from UTF-8 to latin1.
You can do the convertion following this articles:
Convert latin1 to UTF8
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/convert-latin1-to-utf-8
This appears to be a UTF-8 encoding issue that may have been caused by a double-UTF8-encoding of the database file contents.
This situation could happen due to factors such as the character set that was or was not selected (for instance when a database backup file was created) and the file format and encoding database file was saved with.
I have seen these strange UTF-8 characters in the following scenario (the description may not be entirely accurate as I no longer have access to the database in question):
As I recall, there the database and tables had a "uft8_general_ci" collation.
Backup is made of the database.
Backup file is opened on Windows in UNIX file format and with ANSI encoding.
Database is restored on a new MySQL server by copy-pasting the contents from the database backup file into phpMyAdmin.
Looking into the file contents:
Opening the SQL backup file in a text editor shows that the SQL backup file has strange characters such as "sÃ¥". On a side note, you may get different results if opening the same file in another editor. I use TextPad here but opening the same file in SublimeText said "så" because SublimeText correctly UTF8-encoded the file -- still, this is a bit confusing when you start trying to fix the issue in PHP because you don't see the right data in SublimeText at first. Anyways, that can be resolved by taking note of which encoding your text editor is using when presenting the file contents.
The strange characters are double-encoded UTF-8 characters, so in my case the first "Ã" part equals "Ã" and "Â¥" = "¥" (this is my first "encoding"). THe "Ã¥" characters equals the UTF-8 character for "å" (this is my second encoding).
So, the issue is that "false" (UTF8-encoded twice) utf-8 needs to be converted back into "correct" utf-8 (only UTF8-encoded once).
Trying to fix this in PHP turns out to be a bit challenging:
utf8_decode() is not able to process the characters.
// Fails silently (as in - nothing is output)
$str = "så";
$str = utf8_decode($str);
printf("\n%s", $str);
$str = utf8_decode($str);
printf("\n%s", $str);
iconv() fails with "Notice: iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string".
echo iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", "så");
Another fine and possible solution fails silently too in this scenario
$str = "så";
echo html_entity_decode(htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), ENT_QUOTES , 'ISO-8859-15');
mb_convert_encoding() silently: #
$str = "så";
echo mb_convert_encoding($str, 'ISO-8859-15', 'UTF-8');
// (No output)
Trying to fix the encoding in MySQL by converting the MySQL database characterset and collation to UTF-8 was unsuccessfully:
ALTER DATABASE myDatabase CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE myTable CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
I see a couple of ways to resolve this issue.
The first is to make a backup with correct encoding (the encoding needs to match the actual database and table encoding). You can verify the encoding by simply opening the resulting SQL file in a text editor.
The other is to replace double-UTF8-encoded characters with single-UTF8-encoded characters. This can be done manually in a text editor. To assist in this process, you can manually pick incorrect characters from Try UTF-8 Encoding Debugging Chart (it may be a matter of replacing 5-10 errors).
Finally, a script can assist in the process:
$str = "så";
// The two arrays can also be generated by double-encoding values in the first array and single-encoding values in the second array.
$str = str_replace(["Ã","Â¥"], ["Ã","¥"], $str);
$str = utf8_decode($str);
echo $str;
// Output: "så" (correct)
I encountered today quite a similar problem : mysqldump dumped my utf-8 base encoding utf-8 diacritic characters as two latin1 characters, although the file itself is regular utf8.
For example : "é" was encoded as two characters "é". These two characters correspond to the utf8 two bytes encoding of the letter but it should be interpreted as a single character.
To solve the problem and correctly import the database on another server, I had to convert the file using the ftfy (stands for "Fixes Text For You). (https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy) python library. The library does exactly what I expect : transform bad encoded utf-8 to correctly encoded utf-8.
For example : This latin1 combination "é" is turned into an "é".
ftfy comes with a command line script but it transforms the file so it can not be imported back into mysql.
I wrote a python3 script to do the trick :
#!/usr/bin/python3
# coding: utf-8
import ftfy
# Set input_file
input_file = open('mysql.utf8.bad.dump', 'r', encoding="utf-8")
# Set output file
output_file = open ('mysql.utf8.good.dump', 'w')
# Create fixed output stream
stream = ftfy.fix_file(
input_file,
encoding=None,
fix_entities='auto',
remove_terminal_escapes=False,
fix_encoding=True,
fix_latin_ligatures=False,
fix_character_width=False,
uncurl_quotes=False,
fix_line_breaks=False,
fix_surrogates=False,
remove_control_chars=False,
remove_bom=False,
normalization='NFC'
)
# Save stream to output file
stream_iterator = iter(stream)
while stream_iterator:
try:
line = next(stream_iterator)
output_file.write(line)
except StopIteration:
break
Apply these two things.
You need to set the character set of your database to be utf8.
You need to call the mysql_set_charset('utf8') in the file where you made the connection with the database and right after the selection of database like mysql_select_db use the mysql_set_charset. That will allow you to add and retrieve data properly in whatever the language.
The error usually gets introduced while creation of CSV. Try using Linux for saving the CSV as a TextCSV. Libre Office in Ubuntu can enforce the encoding to be UTF-8, worked for me.
I wasted a lot of time trying this on Mac OS. Linux is the key. I've tested on Ubuntu.
Good Luck

Successful Implementations of NAnt bcp (SQL Server) Task?

I am looking for either a NAnt Task for SQL Server bcp, or the file format for bcp native output.
I supposed I could build a NAntContrib Task for bcp but I don't have time at the moment (Do we ever?).
Has anybody strolled this path before? Advice?
Thanks - Jon
bcp doesn't have a native file output format as such, but can produce a binary file where the fields are prefixed by a 1-4 byte header that contains the length of the field. The length of the header or the row/column delimiter formats are specified in the control file (format described here),
If using prefixed files, SQL Server bcp uses a -1 length in the header to denote nulls.
'Native' in bcp-speak refers to binary representations of the column data. This question has some discussion of these formats.
You could always use NAnt's <exec> task to drive bcp...

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