note 96947 modified in ref.mssql by danbrown

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 <?php $x = iconv("UCS-2LE","UTF-8",$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. --was-- 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. http://php.net/manual/en/ref.mssql.php