FreeTDS Development Group

["David Nsengiyumva" <davidn AT finsolutions.co.za>]

Hi there,

I got the latest source codes for FreeTDS 8 and It seems that there are
character conversion routines that I don't understand. I just want to know
that if I am trying to access MS SQL Server 2000 what caracter set must I
set to the 'connect_info->client_charset'.

I've tryied several settings but It does not work. Is there any
documentation about it???

First of all, I've set the 'HAVE_ICONV_ALWAYS' marco to 1 and hence the data
conversion routines will be used. As far as I can understand the 'iconv'
functions.... We've got an array 'canonic_charsets' that consists of
'TDS_ENCODING' and the 'TDS_ENCODING' is just a container (struct) of a
name, min_bytes_per_char and max_bytes_per_char. The first four elements of
the 'canonic_charsets' are set in the beginning ("ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8",
"UCS-2LE", "UCS-2BE").

The 'tds_iconv_init(void)' first calls 'iconv_open' with "ISO-8859-1" and
"UTF-8" as parameters. It seems that the 'iconv_open' function tries to find
if the conversion from 'fromcode' to 'tocode' is possible. But what I don't
understand is that, after testing the conversion from "UTF-8" to
"ISO-8859-1" (which in fact is possible), the 'tds_iconv_init' goes and
tries to find 'UCS-2' in the 'iconv_names'. In my case it does the long
search through the 'canonic_charsets' and it does obviously find the
"UCS-2". But then the search (still using the 'iconv_open' function) of
'iconv_aliases' and 'iconv_names'(this contains only "ISO-8859-1" and
"UTF-8") fails!!! But it sould actually find it because "ISO-8859-1" is
member of 'iconv_aliases' and so is "UTF-8"!!!

I also don't understand this code in the 'tds_iconv_init' function:

        /* we need a UCS-2 (big endian or little endian) */
        if (!iconv_names[POS_UCS2LE] && !iconv_names[POS_UCS2BE])
                return 1;

for me the 'if' succeed and so the function returns 1. AND HENCE THE CALLING
('tds_iconv_open') FUNCTION DOES ASSERT. My interpretation to this is that I
have the wrong connect_info->charset. Can somebody be kind and give me a
documentation about this 'data charset conversion routines' or help me to
find a solution to this problem???? What do I need to do to be able to send
ASCII chars to the server (MS SQL Server 2000)???

My log file looks like this:

Starting log file for FreeTDS 0.60
        on 2003-12-09 19:43:03 with debug level 99.
Using trivial iconv from
        S:\Engines\source\freetds\src\replacements\iconv_replacement.c




Thanx a lot

David Nsengiyumva

Software Developer
Tel:  +27 21 464 7215
Cel:  +27 73 351 3975
Fax:  +27 21 464 7201
http://www.finsolutions.co.za

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