FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From: Philippe PAULEAU [mailto:ppauleau AT cartesis.com]
> Sent: April 3, 2003 9:03 AM
>
> Using protocol 7.0, the french caracters ( accents, é à ... ) are not
> handled correctly.
> I've noticed that 7.0  deals with the special characters in a 
> different way (due to unicode ... )
> So i've tried to change client charset to FR ( and other ISO 
> charsets ) in the config file but nothing works.

If you place this line in freetds.conf:

        client charset = ISO-8859-1

FreeTDS will convert TDS 7.0 strings (encoded in UCS-2), using libiconv.
There are few issues to keep in mind:

1.  Your locale(1) output should indicate that you're configured for
ISO-8859-1.  
2.  FreeTDS converts n[var]char and ntext datatypes, including metadata.  
3.  Ordinary char/varchar data are stored on the server in the server's
(single-byte) character set, and shipped to the client unaltered.  FreeTDS
will not attempt to convert char/varchar data.   For that reason, the
server's character set must match the client's.  

You can check that FreeTDS is converting correctly with "tsql -C" and
TDSDUMP.  The top of the log file will indicate if libiconv was initialized
successfully, and what conversions it will perform.  "tsql -C" will show how
FreeTDS is configured, including whether or not libiconv was linked in.  

Please tell us how you fare.  This functionality is being actively worked
on.  

> For now i only have 2 options:
>  - switch back to 4.2 which works.

Because 4.2 works, it sounds like your server and client character sets are
in order.  

>  - forget french and use english only

George Bush might recommend that, but I don't.  :-)

--jkl


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