I'm making an Arabic website , and after I create the database and start writing Arabic text inside it , it just show ???? , so I change the collation of my Database from SQL_Latien to Arabic_CI_AI
but I'm still getting the ???? inside my fields and when I check the properties of the field I found it SQL_Latien and it doesn't change
so what should I do to fix this problem without repeating building the database
please reply as soon as you can
Thanks in Advance
Database collation is just the default setting for new columns.
To change the collation of an existing column, you'd have to alter table. For example:
alter table YourTable alter column col1 varchar(10) collate Arabic_CI_AI
The collation sequence is the order in which characters appear when you sort (ie. use the 'ORDER BY' clause). Different collations will result in different sort orders.
This is obviously NOT what you are looking for. You problem is storing and retrieving UNICODE characters outside the ASCII range (ie. Arabic characters). To do that, the data types storing this data must support UNICODE, instead of ASCII. Simply, when defining a column, use the data types nchar, nvarchar, and ntext, instead of char, varchar and text.
Related
I have an SQL Table and I'm trying to return the values as a string.
The values should be city names like Sydney, Melbourne, Port Maquarie etc.
But When I run a select I either get black results or as detailed in the first picture some strange backwards L character. The column is an NVARCHAR(MAX)
SELECT ctGlobalName FROM Crm.Cities
Then I tried using MSSQL's Edit top 200 rows feature and I could see the names of the cities, but also all these weird ascii characters.
Now I didn't create the database, I'm just running queries on it. Some things I've read have suggested it is a problem with the Collation. But the table is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS which matches the server collation.
I'm sure there must be something I can add to my select query to return the values as an ordinary string. Is there something I can do to my select query to return the expected format without the weird characters?
An NVARCHAR datatype can store Unicode characters, which are used for languages that are not supported by the ASCII character set i.e. non-English (or related) languages such as Chinese or Indonesian. If your SQL Server or Windows doesn't have that language installed then you might see strange-looking representations of the data.
On the other hand, it could also be that the application that updates this table has just stored bad data in that column.
Either way you might need to do some string manipulation to strip out the characters you don't want.
I would like to change a column collation to some Polish collation and be able to view Polish characters properly. All three, original column, original table and original database, use SQL_Scandinavian_CP850_CS_AS.
For column collation change I tried:
SELECT CAST([ColumnName] AS nvarchar(50)) COLLATE Polish_CI_AS FROM t1
These 3 example letters appear in Scandinavian table:
SELECT 'ØùÒ' COLLATE Polish_CI_AS
Should return in results łŚń. Instead it shows 'OuO'.
Unfortunately SQL Server does not support OEM code page 852 which is what you need to convert code page 850 data into if you want to convert 'ØùÒ' to 'łŚń'. You can change the collation of data without SQL Server doing character mapping by CASTing through varbinary, but this only works with supported collations.
An alternative approach might be to create a user-defined function that takes a string and maps characters one-at-a-time, so Ø maps to ł etc. Fiddly to do, there are (up to) 127 characters to map, but not difficult.
The background of this question is that I have a column with the following definition:
FirstName VARCHAR(100).
I can insert a THAI/Chinese/European value if I change the column datatype to NVARCHAR and when inserting a value I need to Prefix it with N, as
Insert into table ([FirstName]) value(N'THAI/Chinese/European value').
Question:
There are a lot of applications that update this particular column and for me to assist this change I need to make a lot of changes to the procedures and various other application level changes. Is there a way I can make a change at the database level where I can accommodate this change.
Is there a way I can make a change at the database level where I can accommodate this change.
I don't believe there is any way to force SQL Server to handle all varchars as unicode nvarchars. They are simply different datatypes.
If you are using literals in your SQL code, you will have to use N''. Any columns, parameters, or variables that hold the data will have to be nchar/nvarchar. Your apps will all have to send unicode values to the DB.
I would search for "sql server migrate to unicode" for additional reading before you take this on.
While I agree with #TimLehner that I do not know of a way to force SQL Server to handle all varchar columns as nvarchar columns, there are a few things that could make your transition to Unicode strings in the column easier:
To support Unicode values in the column one-off or in an upgrade script, use ALTER TABLE [table] ALTER COLUMN FirstName nvarchar(100). (Of course, be sure to update your create script for [table] if applicable too - i.e. CREATE TABLE [table] (FirstName nvarchar(100)...).)
Use Unicode (i.e. N'SomeFirstName') literals where you expect to insert or set strings with Unicode characters; but continue to use non-Unicode (i.e. 'SomeFirstName') literals where you do not in transition.
Work your way up to altering procedures' parameters (i.e. from varchar to nvarchar) as needed.
Basically, ideally you would change the column and everything related to it to support Unicode at once; but you may be able to limit initial changes to application(s), procedure(s) etcetera that initially need to leverage the column's underlying Unicode support.
You could make use of a stored procedure for inserts and updates. If then the entire application uses that, you can solely update the stored procedure...
But i guess that would still require an update on all locations, so i guess this is not that much help...
I have this problem where in my database I get lots of empty spaces after my text,
In my email I have "something#mail.com+_________________________________________" lots of spaces
My email row is nchar(255)
and that is happening to all of my tables
Can anyone explain to me why is this happening and how to fix it?
CHAR and NCHAR will automatically right-pad a string with spaces to meet the defined length. Use NVARCHAR(255) instead of NCHAR(255).
you should use nvarchar
SQL Server provides both datatypes to store character information. For the most part the two datatypes are identical in how you would work with them within SQL Server or from an application. The difference is that nvarchar is used to store unicode data, which is used to store multilingual data in your database tables. Other languages have an extended set of character codes that need to be saved and this datatype allows for this extension. If your database will not be storing multilingual data you should use the varchar datatype instead. The reason for this is that nvarchar takes twice as much space as varchar, this is because of the need to store the extended character codes for other languages from
I have table in database with Lithuanian_100_CI_AS collation. Some rows has text fields with text, which contains random symbols instead of Lithuanian ones. Is it possible to change the encoding, that i would see the letters i need? Changing collation does totally nothing.
If you have got the data like this (manipulated) then you can not realy save it by changing the collation, but if you set the right collation this could help you to get the data written in a right way to your database (more relevant for the future)
No, the data is random.
You need to
use nvarchar to store this data correctly
ensure the client is using nvarchar for parameters
ensure all string constants have N in front (example: N'foobar')
The collation is not encoding: it only determins how strings and compared/sported, but determines the code page for non-unicode (unicode = nvarchar) columns
Note, the data types "text" and "ntext" are deprecated in SQL Server. Use the max types