Japanese language woes with non-unicode columns

  • Hi Guys

    I am having some issues with non Unicode columns containing Japanese, and the extraction of these as Japanese characters.

    I have a database in our Japanese site with the default collation of Latin1_General_BIN. The columns containing Japanese data in this database are not Unicode fields, due to it being a throw over from the old legacy system that is hosts, so the characters in these columns are displaying as Question Marks etc.

    E.G:

    '“u?{“h?? ?”?R‰i?D' (This should show in Japanese - 日本塗料 株式会社)

    The users are currently working around this by connecting to the database via ODBC and using office apps (Excel/Access etc) and using Office to do the translation, crazy I know!:w00t:

    Is there anyway that I can extract the data from this database and convert to the Japanese character set as we want to export this data into our ODS and run this through a translation tool (as we currently do for our other Chinese site who's database is set up correctly) as this will then make the data a lot more meaningful and we can use SSRS reports etc

    Bit of an odd off the wall request but want to know if anyone has any bright ideas as I am currently stumped.##

    Any wacky ideas welcome!

    Cheers

    Jon

  • Where are you seeing the garbled text? Is it in your SSMS query results window? If so, what happens when you change to a font that supports those characters?

    Thomas Rushton
    blog: https://thelonedba.wordpress.com

  • Hi

    It is in the Query Results window.

    We are trying to run the output through a translation tool, however we need to get it into Japanese first.

    Its very annoying!

    Cheers

    Jon

  • To the best of my knowledge, once the data is stored in the varchar column, there's no way to translate it into the original Unicode characters. Sure, you could do a CONVERT to get it to a Unicode data type, but the Unicode isn't what's stored in the table. The code page is different.

    If anyone has any mechanism that can extract the original Unicode data from the garbled mess, I'd also be very interested in it.

Viewing 4 posts - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply