[unixODBC-support] Unicode Support for UCS-2 databases

[Nick Gorham]

Ingmar Koecher [ NETIKUS.NET ltd ] wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I am having some difficulties adding UTF-16 encoded data to UCS-2 
> databases (e.g. SQL Server) using unixODBC. Most of the problems seem 
> to appear as soon as I attempt to use any of the W() functions (e.g. 
> SQLDriverConnectW()) opposed to the ASCII counterparts.
>
> If I read a UTF-8 encoded file on Linux for example, and add it to a 
> MySQL UTF-8 database for example, then it will work and I don't even 
> have to do anything (other than enclosing the field with N''). So this 
> works well.
>
> If I try to write to a UTF-16/UCS-2 database however, I start having 
> all sorts of problems. If I store a SQL statement:
>
> wchar_t sqlStmt[] = L"INSERT INTO MyTable (field) values (?)";
>
> then SQLExecDirectW will complain (or better the database will) as it 
> only sees the "I" characters, the first one. Almost as if it's 
> expecting an ASCII string.
>
> However, at this point I can't even connect using SQLDriverConnectW() 
> when passing a wchar_t string:
>
> SQLDriverConnectW (hdbc, 0, (SQLWCHAR *) L"MyDsnName", ....);
>
> as it complains that it's not a valid DSN. My guess is that it's only 
> looking for the first string as well here - or does the odbc.ini file 
> actually need to be UTF-16 encoded? Is there something else that I 
> need to do, to get this to work?
>
> Is there any sample code that shows how to deal with UTF-16/UCS-2 
> data, or is this not very common?
>
> I'm pretty much at a loss here. The biggest problem I cannot seem to 
> resolve, is how I can get UTF-8 data on Non-Windows platforms into a 
> UCS-2 database. I can convert the UTF-8 string into a UTF-16 string, 
> but that's about it.
>
> I've tried to find information about wchar_t handling of unixODBC, and 
> the ....W() functions, with little success though.
>
> Any insight that can be provided would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
> Thank you,
> Ingmar.
>
>   
I would check, but wchar_t is often 32bits not the 16 bits ODBC expects.

-- 
Nick