Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

I saw a post recently from someone that was having trouble with Chinese characters being inserted into a SQL Server table. I’m not sure if they were using an application or just SSMS, but they inserted this:

insert into mytable select ‘<IDC>??(DS3?DS4)-??/??????</IDC>’

And they got this in the table:

<IDC>??(DS3?DS4)-??/??????</IDC>

That’s a problem that I can see, even if I can’t read Chinese.

Someone else posted a note that when you insert, you need to let SQL Server know your string is Unicode. That means prefixing your string with an N’.

I looked in Books Online, and found this note under the nvarchar section:

“Prefix Unicode character string constants with the letter N. Without the N prefix, the string is converted to the default code page of the database. This default code page may not recognize certain characters.”

I think this means that the N’ isn’t necessarily required, but it depends on the default code page of your database. For most of us, if we don’t include it, I believe our data gets converted to UTF-16, which might not be what we want.

SQLNewBlogger

I ran across the post and spent 5 minutes researching things and looking in BOL. This really took about 5 more minutes to write.

Reference

NVarchar –  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186939.aspx

Filed under: Blog Tagged: SQLNewBlogger, syndicated, T-SQL