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.

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Full Width Textareas

    Working with textarea widths can be painful if you want the textarea to span 100% width.  Why painful?  Because if the textarea's containing element has padding, your "width:100%" textarea will likely stretch outside of the parent container -- a frustrating prospect to say the least.  Luckily...

  • By
    Unicode CSS Classes

    CSS class name structure and consistency is really important; some developers camelcase classnames, others use dashes, and others use underscores.  One thing I've learned when toying around by HTML and CSS class names is that you can actually use unicode symbols and icons as classnames.

Discussion

  1. 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. 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. 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. 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!