Getting data with UTF-8 charset from MSSQL server using PHP FreeTDS extension

Question

I can\'t seem to get data from MSSQL encoded as UTF-8 using FreeTDS extension.

Connecting:

ini_set(\'mssql.charset\', \'UTF-8\');
$this->_resource         


        

Answer 1

I had a similar problem and tried all settings i could find on the web - in vain.

In my case the problem was the configuration of FreeTDS itself. On Linux the file is /etc/freetds/freetds.conf

I had to change the Version to 7.0 (maybe other numbers work, too. i just tried 7.0)

[global]
    # TDS protocol version
    tds version = 7.0

After this, the driver seemed to accept changes of the charset like.

ini_set('mssql.charset', 'UTF-8');

Btw: the change immediately is in effect, no need to restart anything afterwards

Answer 2

It seem version 7.0 or great is required. iconv() also seems to work well, but is tedious.

$query = $this->db->query($sql);
$result = $query->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_OBJ);
foreach ($result as $row) {
    foreach (get_object_vars($row) as $key => $value) {
    $row->$key = (mb_detect_encoding($value, mb_detect_order(), true) === 'UTF-8') 
            ? $value : iconv('iso-8859-1', 'utf-8', $value);
    }
    $results[] = $row;
}