CHAR(222) will be interpreted differently depending on the code page. If you are using code page 1252 (US English), it is Þ. It would only be an ASCII right half block in an old MSDOS code page (839 I think).

NCHAR(222), whatever it is, is Unicode and should be the same character everywhere. That's the whole point of Unicode. I don't have much experience with Unicode, I haven't seen anything like the replacement originally posted before, and I have no idea where double-byte character equivalents are documented. After trying the sample code that was posted however, and seeing that a Unicode "th" was indeed recognized as CHAR(222), it didn't take much imagination to conclude that this only works when one or both of the arguments are Unicode.