handling foreign characters

I have a database that will be accepting foreign characters from different
languages, as in Germany, Russia, Japanese, Chinese and so on. I was
wondering if there was anything different you need to set up on the database
for this to work properly, as I am currently working in a database and any
characters from Japanese and Chinese show up as ? marks. Any help would be
appreciated, thanks.
J. DThis might actually be a genuine case to use the unicode datatype. You do us
e
it, don't you?
Where do those special characters "show up as ? marks"? If they are
displayed correctly in the appropriate client application, then I guess
you're done. :)
ML|||JD wrote:
> I have a database that will be accepting foreign characters from
> different languages, as in Germany, Russia, Japanese, Chinese and so
> on. I was wondering if there was anything different you need to set
> up on the database for this to work properly, as I am currently
> working in a database and any characters from Japanese and Chinese
> show up as ? marks. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
As ML said, you need to use unicode data types (nchar, nvarchar, and
ntext) in order to store 2-byte characters requires by some languages.
In addition, the client application that retrieves the data must use
unicode variables (this should be automatic in most programming
languages). Then you need to make sure the objects used in the
application to display the unicode data support unicode and the font
that is used is unicode supported. Fonts like Tahoma are OpenType fonts,
meaning they have Font Fallback which links to fonts that support East
Asian script characters if run on those versions of Windows. You can
always use the Arial Unicode font, which is a 24MB font that
encapsulates most all languages for testing.
David Gugick
Quest Software
www.imceda.com
www.quest.com