note 96947 added to ref.mssql

I worked on a project with a MS SQL server 2008 containing data of NVARCHAR type in multiple languages, including asian characters. It is a known issue, that the PHP MSSQL functions are not able to retrieve unicode data form NVARCHAR or NTEXT data fields. I spent some time searching for possible solutions and finaly found a work arround, that provides correct display of latin and asian fonts from a NVARCHAR field. Do a SQL query, while you convert the NVARCHAR data first to VARBINARY and then to VARCHAR SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(MAX),CONVERT(VARBINARY(MAX),nvarchar_col)) AS x FROM dbo.table While you fetch the result set in PHP, use the iconv() function to convert the data to unicode $x = iconv("UCS-2LE","UTF-8",$row['x']); Now you can ouput the text to UTF-8 encoded page with the correct characters. This workarround did run on IIS 6.0 with PHP 5.2.6 running as FastCGI. ---- Server IP: 62.2.182.223 Probable Submitter: 194.204.66.37 ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.mssql.php Edit -- https://master.php.net/note/edit/96947 Del: integrated -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/96947/integrated Del: useless -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/96947/useless Del: bad code -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/96947/bad+code Del: spam -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/96947/spam Del: non-english -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/96947/non-english Del: in docs -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/96947/in+docs Del: other reasons-- https://master.php.net/note/delete/96947 Reject -- https://master.php.net/note/reject/96947 Search -- https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php