FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <james.k.lowden AT alliancebernstein.com>]

> From: jack brack
> Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2006 5:27 AM
> 
> For this php code:
>  sybase_connect($user, $pass, $serv, "iso_1")
> 
> Why does CT try to connect as UTF-8?
> 
> It does the same for this one too:
> 
>   sybase_connect($user, $pass, $serv, "iso-8859-1")
> 
> but Sybase doesn't recognise the character set.

What is it you're trying to do?  

Daniel is right that FreeTDS doesn't convert character data for TDS 5.0
connections.  It could (with commitment and extensive testing), but it
shouldn't have to, for the simple reason that Sybase servers should
DTRT: Sybase has a "Server makes right" policy of sending data to the
client using the encoding specified by the client.  

The trick, then, is to make sure the server knows the client's encoding.
That information is included in the TDS 5.0 login packet: 

$ sed -ne '437,445p' src/tds/login.c 
       /* use charset nearest to client or nothing */
        server_charset = NULL;
        if (!tds_dstr_isempty(&connection->server_charset))
                server_charset =
tds_dstr_cstr(&connection->server_charset);
        else
                server_charset =
tds_sybase_charset_name(tds_dstr_cstr(&connection->client_charset));
        if (!server_charset)
                server_charset = "";
        tds_put_login_string(tds, server_charset, TDS_MAX_LOGIN_STR_SZ);
/* charset */

The variable 'connection->server_charset' is read from locales.conf.
You should see it logged if you use TDSDUMPCONFIG.  The string must be a
Sybase-recognized charset name.  

I think there's an error somewhere, though, so I'm going to suggest you
change your locales.conf.  In src/tds/config.c, we read locales.conf
thusly:

        } else if (!strcmp(option, TDS_STR_CHARSET)) {
                tds_dstr_copy(&connection->server_charset, value);
                tdsdump_log(TDS_DBG_INFO1, "%s is %s.\n", option,
tds_dstr_cstr(
&connection->server_charset));

That means we're looking for an attribute string defined by
TDS_STR_CHARSET:

$ grep TDS_STR_CHARSET include/*.h
include/tds.h:#define TDS_STR_CHARSET   "charset"

No space.  Ouch.  So try changing your locales.conf to:

[default]
        language = english
        charset = iso_1

Turn on TDSDUMPCONFIG to confirm it's being used.  

If no server charset is found, the above login.c code sends a NULL,
telling the server to use its default encoding.  My guess is that until
now everyone's been satisfied with that and no one has noticed that
locales.conf is using the wrong attribute string.  

HTH.

Apologia: This whole business is messy.  There's no reason on God's
green earth that your Sybase encoding should be sneaked into
locales.conf while the Microsoft (libiconv) encoding is in freetds.conf.
It's poorly documented to boot, because yours truly hasn't understood it
very well, because it's not very widely used (IMO).  And it's a real
shame that sybase_connect() sees its 3rd parameter ignored.  That's not
very nice.  

--jkl




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