FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT freetds.org>]

On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 14:20:28 +0400
Vano Beridze <vano.beridze AT silkroad.ge> wrote:

> The script works fine. it connects and gets the data. The only
> problem I have is that data is shown as question marks, so it's not
> converted to UTF-8. I've read all the information I could find on the
> internet but can not solve the problem.

I would set TDSDUMP and examine the log.  You're right that
FreeTDS would substitute question marks for any non-convertible
character.  Perhaps the character set name you specified in
freetds.conf isn't exactly right, perhaps because you're linked to the
system iconv library.  

The status of iconv is listed at the top of the log.  If it says it set
the client charset to UTF-8, that's what it will use.  

A different problem that sometimes crops up: sometimes the "Unicode"
data on the server isn't UCS2.  In that event, the server will send the
data, but the iconv library will be unable to convert the characters
correctly.  

--jkl