I have an ACCESS database in which characters are Arabic but displayed like this "ÇáÓíÏ ÇáÇãíä ÇáÚÇã ááÍßæãÉ" , is there any solution to this problem please? Thanks
This is a collation problem.
ALTER DATABASE (Database name here) COLLATE Arabic_CI_AS ;
All databases have a default collation (which can be set when creating or altering a database. This collation is used for all metadata in the database, as well as the default for all string columns within the database. Users can choose a different collation for any particular column by using the COLLATE clause.
Go here, for further reading.
I have bulk-data in SQL-Server table. One of the fields contains following data :
'(اے انسان!) کیا تو نہیں جانتا)'
Tried:
SELECT * from Ayyat where Data like '%انسان%' ;
but it is showing no-result.
Plese use N before string if language is not a english:
SELECT * from Ayyat where Data like N'%انسان%' ;
If you're storing urdu, arabic or other language except english in your database first you should convert your database into another format and then also table.
first you've to convert your database charset and also collation alter your database
ALTER DATABASE database_name CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci
then convert your table
ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci
after this execute normal your query
SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE Datas LIKE '%انسان%'
Note: if you not convert your database and table other languages and special characters will be changed into question marks.
I have a database field with nVarchar(30). I am using asp.net MVC. When i insert the record in Unicode, i get ?????.
Any one can tell me how can i convert a string to unicode and insert into database.
I am using SQL Server 2008 R2.
Try to change your database collation to Latin1_General_BIN2.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175835.aspx
Make sure:
You Use N' at the start of string literals containing such strings, e.g. N'enović'
If you want to query and ignore accents, then you can add a COLLATE clause to your select. E.g.:
SELECT * FROM Account
WHERE Name = 'enovic' COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AI
I've migrated a database from mysql to SQL Server (politics), original mysql database using UTF8.
Now I read https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/7346/sql-server-2005-2008-utf-8-collation-charset that SQL Server 2008 doesn't support utf8, is this a joke?
The SQL Server hosts multiple databases, mostly Latin-encoded. Since the migrated db is intended for web publishing, I want to keep the utf8-encoding. Have I missed something or do I need to enc/dec at application level?
UTF-8 is not a character set, it's an encoding. The character set for UTF-8 is Unicode. If you want to store Unicode text you use the nvarchar data type.
If the database would use UTF-8 to store text, you would still not get the text out as encoded UTF-8 data, you would get it out as decoded text.
You can easily store UTF-8 encoded text in the database, but then you don't store it as text, you store it as binary data (varbinary).
Looks like this will be finally supported in the SQL Server 2019!
SQL Server 2019 - whats new?
From BOL:
UTF-8 support
Full support for the widely used UTF-8 character encoding as an import
or export encoding, or as database-level or column-level collation for
text data. UTF-8 is allowed in the CHAR and VARCHAR datatypes, and is
enabled when creating or changing an object’s collation to a collation
with the UTF8 suffix.
For example,LATIN1_GENERAL_100_CI_AS_SC to
Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_KS_SC_UTF8. UTF-8 is only available to Windows
collations that support supplementary characters, as introduced in SQL
Server 2012. NCHAR and NVARCHAR allow UTF-16 encoding only, and remain
unchanged.
This feature may provide significant storage savings, depending on the
character set in use. For example, changing an existing column data
type with ASCII strings from NCHAR(10) to CHAR(10) using an UTF-8
enabled collation, translates into nearly 50% reduction in storage
requirements. This reduction is because NCHAR(10) requires 22 bytes
for storage, whereas CHAR(10) requires 12 bytes for the same Unicode
string.
2019-05-14 update:
Documentation seems to be updated now and explains our options staring in MSSQL 2019 in section "Collation and Unicode Support".
2019-07-24 update:
Article by Pedro Lopes - Senior Program Manager # Microsoft about introducing UTF-8 support for Azure SQL Database
No! It's not a joke.
Take a look here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186939.aspx
Character data types that are either fixed-length, nchar, or
variable-length, nvarchar, Unicode data and use the UNICODE UCS-2
character set.
And also here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16
The older UCS-2 (2-byte Universal Character Set) is a similar
character encoding that was superseded by UTF-16 in version 2.0 of the
Unicode standard in July 1996.
Two UDF to deal with UTF-8 in T-SQL:
CREATE Function UcsToUtf8(#src nvarchar(MAX)) returns varchar(MAX) as
begin
declare #res varchar(MAX)='', #pi char(8)='%[^'+char(0)+'-'+char(127)+']%', #i int, #j int
select #i=patindex(#pi,#src collate Latin1_General_BIN)
while #i>0
begin
select #j=unicode(substring(#src,#i,1))
if #j<0x800 select #res=#res+left(#src,#i-1)+char((#j&1984)/64+192)+char((#j&63)+128)
else select #res=#res+left(#src,#i-1)+char((#j&61440)/4096+224)+char((#j&4032)/64+128)+char((#j&63)+128)
select #src=substring(#src,#i+1,datalength(#src)-1), #i=patindex(#pi,#src collate Latin1_General_BIN)
end
select #res=#res+#src
return #res
end
CREATE Function Utf8ToUcs(#src varchar(MAX)) returns nvarchar(MAX) as
begin
declare #i int, #res nvarchar(MAX)=#src, #pi varchar(18)
select #pi='%[à-ï][€-¿][€-¿]%',#i=patindex(#pi,#src collate Latin1_General_BIN)
while #i>0 select #res=stuff(#res,#i,3,nchar(((ascii(substring(#src,#i,1))&31)*4096)+((ascii(substring(#src,#i+1,1))&63)*64)+(ascii(substring(#src,#i+2,1))&63))), #src=stuff(#src,#i,3,'.'), #i=patindex(#pi,#src collate Latin1_General_BIN)
select #pi='%[Â-ß][€-¿]%',#i=patindex(#pi,#src collate Latin1_General_BIN)
while #i>0 select #res=stuff(#res,#i,2,nchar(((ascii(substring(#src,#i,1))&31)*64)+(ascii(substring(#src,#i+1,1))&63))), #src=stuff(#src,#i,2,'.'),#i=patindex(#pi,#src collate Latin1_General_BIN)
return #res
end
Note that as of Microsoft SQL Server 2016, UTF-8 is supported by bcp, BULK_INSERT, and OPENROWSET.
Addendum 2016-12-21: SQL Server 2016 SP1 now enables Unicode Compression (and most other previously Enterprise-only features) for all versions of MS SQL including Standard and Express. This is not the same as UTF-8 support, but it yields a similar benefit if the goal is disk space reduction for Western alphabets.
I am using SQL Server 2008 express edition and its collation settings are set to default.I wish to store special characeters like á ,â ,ã ,å ,ā ,ă ,ą ,ǻ in my database but it converts them into normal characters like 'a'. How can I stop SQL Server from doing so?
Make sure that your columns are using the type nvarchar(...), rather than varchar(...). The former is Unicode, the latter is ASCII.
Also, make sure that your database default collation is set to Accent Sensitive, and that your columns are stored that way. You may also want to check your instance default collation, as that affects the default collation for your system databases, particularly tempdb.
Rahul, here is a very simple query that runs perfectly on SQL 2005 and 2008:
Query
DECLARE #t1 TABLE (
Col1 nvarchar(30)
)
INSERT INTO #t1 VALUES (N'á ,â ,ã ,å ,ā ,ă ,ą ,ǻ')
SELECT * FROM #t1
Result
Col1
------------------------------
á ,â ,ã ,å ,ā ,ă ,ą ,ǻ
There is nothing special here. No collation change from default, just a simple NVARCHAR column.
You said you are "just running direct queries in the database". Can you try this query and see if you get the same results?