PHP + SQL Server - How to set charset for connection?
Solution 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
Solution 2:
I had the same problem and ini_set('mssql.charset', 'utf-8')
did not work for me.
However, it worked in uppercase:
ini_set('mssql.charset', 'UTF-8');
Solution 3:
I suggest looking at the following points:
- 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)
- 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) - Ensure that your browsers charset is also set to UTF-8