FreeTDS Development Group

["ZIGLIO, Frediano, VF-IT" <Frediano.Ziglio AT vodafone.com>]

> 
> Hello,
> SQLDescribeCol returns SQL_VARCHAR - 12 - type for MS SQL Server
> nvarchar(...) field at present. The FreeTDS documentation 
> states that "At
> some future time, FreeTDS aims to support Unicode and other multi-byte
> character sets. It does not do so at the current time."
> Do you plan to path the unicode strings as is through the 
> FreeTDS layer in
> the nearest future? If no then is it considered to be hard if 
> I decide to
> implement it myself?
> 
> Thank you in advance,

It's difficult to describe how current FreeTDS support unicode. If you
set charset to UTF-8 you can say that FreeTDS support unicode but if you
mean ODBC 3.5 extension (like SQLDescribeColW or SQL_WVARCHAR) FreeTDS
do not support unicode (FreeTDS ODBC it's 3.0, not 3.5).
How hard it's to add support for ODBC 3.5 and wide character? libTDS
(the core of FreeTDS) currently convert any char it receive to client
charset ASAP. ODBC 3.5 require that you can translate to multi-byte
encoding and to "unicode" (for portability reason it's better to call it
wide character in this context). So IMHO libTDS should be able to store
data in original format just to be prepared to convert data into wide
character or client charset. However this raise also a big problem.
What's to return from SQL_DESC_OCTET_LENGTH or SQL_DESC_LENGTH? For
example if a column it's varchar(10) and we fetch SQL_DESC_OCTET_LENGTH
what information to return ? Keep in mind that if varchar contains for
example 6 bytes (that's different from 6 characters) this can be
converted to 3 wide characters or even 6 wide characters depending on
coding...

freddy77