Dear SQLers:

I think I have just managed to enable Unicode on my Windows XP
system. Some stuff does not seem to be displaying correctly. Some
has. Maybe I am missing a bit?

I found a lorem ipsum page for Russian, and a couple of
paragraphs of that worked fine. Only some Russian characters from the
Wikipedia page on Unicode worked.

Does anyone know of a good test for Unicode? If it also applies
directly to SQL Server, so much the better.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

On 2011-04-26 00:38, Gene Wirchenko wrote:
depending what side of the pond you're on). Unicode (more accurately UTF-16)
is the native character set of Windows XP. Nothing needs to be done to
enable it.

Maybe you just installed some new fonts, like Arial Unicode MS, that allow
the system to display characters it otherwise has no font for? There are
various other settings and packages you could be alluding to, but it's not
clear which.


--
J.

Gene Wirchenko (genew (AT) ocis (DOT) net) writes:
Jeroen said most of it - you need a good font to see all characters. Arial
or Times Roman should do. I don't remember, maybe there are some options
when you install XP - it was so long ago.

If you see block characters where you expected to see something else, that
means that the font is insufficient. If you see question marks, it means
that there was conversion of some sort, and the character was converted to
a fallback character.

Anyway, for SQL Server the important thing to keep in mind that character
literals like this: 'abc' are always varchar, not matter what exotic
characters you put in it. You need to say N'abc' to get a nvarchar (i.e.
Unicode) literal.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel (AT) sommarskog (DOT) se

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