PHP + SQL Server - How to set charset for connection?

Question

I\'m trying to store some data in a SQL Server database through php.

Problem is that special chars aren\'t converted properly. My app\'s charset is iso-8859-1 and th

Answer 1

Client charset is necessary but not sufficient:

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

I searched for two days how to insert UTF-8 data (from web forms) into MSSQL 2008 through PHP. I read everywhere that you can't, you need to convert to UCS2 first (like cypher's solution recommends). On Windows SQLSRV said to be a good solution, which I couldn't try, since I am developing on Mac OSX.

However, FreeTDS manual (what PHP mssql uses on OSX) says to add a letter "N" before the opening quote:

mssql_query("INSERT INTO table (nvarcharField) VALUES (N'űáúőűá球最大的采购批发平台')", +xon);

According to this discussion, N character tells the server to convert to Unicode. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/155859/why-do-we-need-to-put-n-before-strings-in-microsoft-sql-server

Answer 2

For me editing this file:
/etc/freetds/freetds.conf
...and changing/setting 'tds version' parameter to '7.0' helped. Edit your freetds.conf and try to change this parameter for your server configuration (or global).

It will work even without apache restart.

Answer 3

I did not notice someone to mention another way of converting results from MSSQL database. The good old iconv() function:

iconv (string $in_charset, string $out_charset, string $str): string;

In my case everything else failed to provide meaningful conversion, except this one when getting the results. Of course, this is done inside the loop of parsing the results of the query - from CP1251 to UTF-8:

foreach ($records as $row=>$col) {
    $array[$row]['StatusName'] = iconv ('CP1251', 'UTF-8' , $records[$row]['StatusName']);
}

Ugly, but it works.

Answer 4

You should set the charset with ini_set('mssql.charset', 'windows-1252') before the connection. If you use it after the mssql_connect it has no effect.

Answer 5

Just adding ini_set('mssql.charset', 'UTF-8'); didn't help me in my case. I had to specify the UTF-8 character set on the column:

$age = 30;  
$name = utf8_encode("Joe");    

$select = sqlsrv_query($conn, "SELECT * FROM Users WHERE Age = ? AND Name = ?",
    array(array($age), array($name, SQLSRV_PARAM_IN, SQLSRV_PHPTYPE_STRING('UTF-8')));

Answer 6

I suggest looking at the following points:

1. Ensure that the columns that you're storing the information in are nchar or nvarchar as char and nvarchar don't support UCS-2 (SQLServer doesn't store in UTF-8 format btw)
2. If you're connecting with the mssql library/extension for PHP, run: ini_set('mssql.charset', 'utf-8'); as there's no function with a charset argument (connect, query etc)
3. Ensure that your browsers charset is also set to UTF-8