Can we change our app to support japanese characters?

Question

User-1497671673 posted

Hi Guys,

We have some software that works with a sql database, our customers want to use japanese characters. When they try and use it with our softare and save the characters through a form, the characters get corrupted. They have said that if we change the charater encoding in our database that we can save jap characters. What im workdering is if we do this will it affect the current data and do our forms have to be rewritten to handle these characters?

Any advice much appreciated...

Pete

Answer 1

User560403387 posted

I'm of course not sure where exactly your data gets corrupted, but it shouldn't be too painful to support Japanese. As internally all strings in .NET are unicode, there are usually only two areas where things are likely to go wrong:

• Your interface: Your pages should be encoded in utf-8 (they probably are; it's the default encoding in visual studio)
• Your database: Your string fields should be nvarchar, rather than varchar

Changing either setting doesn't take a lot of time, and shouldn't affect any of your current data. Of course you should thoroughly test anyway.

Menno

Answer 2

User78336405 posted

Hi,

Try to change the SQL Collation to japanese. 

Answer 3

User-319574463 posted

They have said that if we change the charater encoding in our database that we can save jap characters.

In your SQL database, what data types do you use for your strings?

• Instead of VARCHAR you should use NVARCHAR
• Instead of CHAR you should use NCHAR
• If using a version of SQL prior to 2005, use NTEXT instead of TEXT

Do you use stored procedures or raw TSQL to insert and update data. If the latter, instead of

INSERT INTO FRED(A, B) VALUES ('A', 'Hello')

use

INSERT INTO FRED(A, B) VALUES (@'A', @'Hello')

Answer 4

User-1200560727 posted

Please go through below post:

http://forums.asp.net/t/1560929.aspx

It will helpful to solve your problem.