FreeTDS Development Group

[Brian Bruns <camber AT ais.org>]

TDS 7.0 is completely unicode at the protocol level.  Currently, what we
do is strip it to ascii (ie ignore high order bytes), so it is broken for
virtually all non-western languages.  I've basically held off fixing it
because I felt converting it to UTF-8 may break some applications not
expecting multibyte characters, but also because we are a bunch of english
speakers trying to decide what is best for speakers of other languages ;-)

So, I been basically waiting for someone who is actually going to use TDS
7 with a language other than english to tell me what their applications
require.  Should the text be exported as UTF-8, UCS2, localized into a
non-ascii 8bit character set, or some other option?

Nows your chance to get it your way.  Let me know what your requirements
are.

Brian

On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Ed Edgar wrote:

> I'm using FreeTDS 4.2 to connect to MSSQL server 2000, and for the time
> being appear to be importing and exporting Japanese text successfully, but
> not really in the way you're supposed to.
> 
> We have an English version of MSSQL server, which as far as I know doesn't
> know anything about the fact that we're using Japanese text. We also store
> text in all the other CJK languages in the same database in the same way.
> So all MSSQL server sees is a bunch of 7 or 8 bit characters, which it
> leaves alone.
> 
> Initially I tried using FreeTDS 7, but that often broke Japanese text,
> presumably by assuming it was ascii and then converting it to unicode,
> which didn't work because it wasn't ascii.
> 
> Is this just an accident waiting to happen, though? Has anyone else tried
> this kind of thing and run into problems, and if so, what kind of
> problems?
>