Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

PHP, ODBC, and nvarchar

By  on  

I stumbled upon an odd error using PHP's ODBC functions to query a SQL Server 2005 database. I was doing a basic SELECT statement to get the description of something when I encountered the following error:

Warning: odbc_exec() [function.odbc-exec]: SQL error: [unixODBC][FreeTDS][SQL Server]Unicode data in a Unicode-only collation or ntext data cannot be sent to clients using DB-Library (such as ISQL) or ODBC version 3.7 or earlier., SQL state in SQLExecDirect in /home/web/file.php on line 4

It turns out that the PHP ODBC functions have a hard time pulling "nvarchar" data. Here's the ugly solution to getting nvarchar data:

SELECT CAST(CAST([DetailedDescription] AS VARCHAR(8000)) AS TEXT) AS ad FROM mytable WHERE active = 1

Not pretty but making it function is what counts.

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Telephone Link Protocol

    We've always been able to create links with protocols other than the usual HTTP, like mailto, skype, irc ,and more;  they're an excellent convenience to visitors.  With mobile phone browsers having become infinitely more usable, we can now extend that convenience to phone numbers: The tel...

  • By
    Create a Quick MooTools Slideshow with Preloading Images

    I've been creating a lot of slideshow posts lately. Why, you ask? Because they help me get chicks. A quick formula for you: The following code snippet will show you how to create a simple slideshow with MooTools; the script will also...

Discussion

  1. David

    THANKS!!!
    muchas gracias.. ahora puedo seguir trabajando tranquilo.. justamante estaba teniendo problemas con un campo nvarchar.

  2. umberleigh

    Casting to varchar limits you to 8000 characters in a field.

    I found just casting to text works better, like so:

    print("SELECT CAST([column_name] AS TEXT) AS column_0 FROM table_name");
  3. andy

    Thanks , nice solve problem from sql server

  4. San

    Cast did the job ….

    Nice post !!!

  5. mohi

    not work!

    Warning: mssql_query() [function.mssql-query]: message: Incorrect syntax near ‘ASâ’. (severity 15) in /var/www/vhosts/fvc.ir/httpdocs/mssql.php on line 11

  6. OZ

    Thank you very very much!
    And here is how to write value:
    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7255703/utf-8-in-sql-server-2008-database-php

    $value = 'ŽČŘĚÝÁÖ';
$value = iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-16LE', $value); //convert into native encoding 
$value = bin2hex($value); //convert into hexadecimal
$query = 'INSERT INTO some_table (some_nvarchar_field)  VALUES(CONVERT(nvarchar(MAX), 0x'.$value.'))';
  7. Radu

    thanks a lot. i was not shure what was the problem. In the sql management studio the data looks fine and in php is not. my first impresion was user rights for the data .. but after 1 hour of hair pulling :) i wandered if culd be the odbc … and like this i found your post

    thanks again

  8. Riyas

    Thanks for this solution. I was stuck at this problem and finally reached here

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!