How to add japanese in a table

Ever wonder what the difference between varchar and nvarchar was? Well I'm still not sure what it is but one thing I discovered today was that to add japanese characters in a database, you have to use the nxxx version datatype.

For example, I have to develop a japanese version of a website I created at work and ended up with a bunch of ??????? instead of the japanese characters in the table I store the content.

To my surprise, the only thing I was missing was the letter 'N'. I changed the datatype of the column containing the content from text to ntext and did something similar to the following:

insert into CMS_MYTABLE (LOCATION, LANGID, REGION, CONTENT)
values ('About', 4, 'Main', N'??????????????????????????????');

Now, when ever I need to add some japanese characters, I just use the 'N' prefix in the string I am inserting.

Simple as 'N'.

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Print posted @ Friday, May 06, 2005 2:09 PM

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# re: How to add japanese in a table

ROFL!

As you can see, this blog doesn't use the nvarchar or nxxx as datatypes resulting in my japanese characters displaying ???????.

Life is ironic in so many ways. 5/6/2005 2:15 PM | J-F

# re: How to add japanese in a table

nvarchar creates fixed-length character fields while varchar creates variable-length fields. Dunno why this is what is needed for Japanese - probably tells the browser that you're using a different character set... Also, if you look at auto-generated drop/create scripts in SQL Server, many of the system tables use nvarchar fields... 5/7/2005 1:34 PM | protected static

# d'oh! Unicode! (was re: How to add japanese in a table)

I went and looked it up... Japanese characters require Unicode support - SQL Server supports Unicode in nchar, nvarchar & ntext fields, which would also explain why the system tables use those data types as well. 5/7/2005 1:48 PM | protected static

# re: How to add japanese in a table

Ah, that would explain it. Thanks for the info. :) 5/8/2005 10:47 PM | JF

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