Character Encoding: â??
- by akaphenom
I am trying to piece together the mysterious string of characters â?? I am seeing quite a bit of in our database - I am fairly sure this is a result of conversion between character encodings, but I am not completely positive.
The users are able to enter text (or cut and paste) into a Ext-Js rich text editor. The data is posted to a severlet which persists it to the database, and when I view it in the database i see those strange characters...
is there any way to decode these back to their original meaning, if I was able to discover the correct encoding - or is there a loss of bits or bytes that has occured through the conversion process?
Users are cutting and pasting from multiple versions of MS Word and PDF. Does the encoding follow where the user copied from?
Thank you
website is UTF-8
We are using ms sql server 2005;
SELECT serverproperty('Collation') -- Server default collation.
Latin1_General_CI_AS
SELECT databasepropertyex('xxxx', 'Collation') -- Database default
SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
and the column:
Column_name Type Computed Length Prec Scale Nullable TrimTrailingBlanks FixedLenNullInSource Collation
text varchar no -1 yes no yes SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
The non-Unicode equivalents of the
nchar, nvarchar, and ntext data types
in SQL Server 2000 are listed below.
When Unicode data is inserted into one
of these non-Unicode data type columns
through a command string (otherwise
known as a "language event"), SQL
Server converts the data to the data
type using the code page associated
with the collation of the column. When
a character cannot be represented on a
code page, it is replaced by a
question mark (?), indicating the data
has been lost. Appearance of
unexpected characters or question
marks in your data indicates your data
has been converted from Unicode to
non-Unicode at some layer, and this
conversion resulted in lost
characters.
So this may be the root cause of the problem... and not an easy one to solve on our end.
