UTF-8 and MSSQL

[RFH Customer: creativeworks]

Afternoon.

I'm working on a custom VB.Net cms working with an MS SQL database.

The web.config is ensuring globalization is UTF-8, the .net page is ensuring UTF-8, the html tag is ensuring UTF-8...

My problem is the recent addition of Polish pages, and Polish characters!

The web page is delivering the correct special polish characters after submission when I run a quick response.write - BUT! (here it is) the characters are not being saved into the database...

any ideas?

[RFH Reseller: Tanzy]

Is the field that the data is being saved into a varchar or nvarchar. As a varchar will only store ansii standard character. Make sure that you are using nvarchar to store this type of data.

[RFH Customer: creativeworks]

I'm storing as ntext... as it's an HTML editor text box from a CMS system.

Perhaps it's worth changing to an nvarchar with a large amount of characters?

Other forums show:

NVARCHAR uses 2-byte characters so only half the "max" data (4000 vs 8000) characters can be stored. If you must support UTF-8 character sets, NVARCHAR is the way to go. If not, stick with VARCHAR for single-character character sets.

Unforunately! As it's an HTML editor text box, one of the entries exceeds 5000 characters! nvarchar isn't an immediate solution.

Perhaps a function changing all special characters to their UTF-8 code?!

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

NTEXT should be fine, what about the SQL connection - is that definitely being made with a UTF8 charset (try running a simple SELECT 'POLISH TEXT HERE' to see what comes back)?

[RFH Reseller: SKILLIT]

I am using varchar and European character sets (that I use - mainly french) seems to work fine.

I do however include following on pages which can contain non standard characters .

Response.CharSet = "utf-8"
Response.CodePage = 65001

See
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/232580


David.

[RFH Reseller: jimlewis]

Hi,

NText should be find - if you were using sql 2005 i would suggest nvarchar(max).

The following statements I would omit

Response.CharSet = "utf-8"
Response.CodePage = 65001

But ensure that the following is present in the head section of the page

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

James