Strange Question Mart in the Output

Question

User-1284851152 posted

Hi,

I wonder why the strange ?????? is appearing in the below query result .  Really don't know about the root cause of this issue. Can someone please shed light on this problem?

if OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#TB_SPECS') is not null drop table #TB_SPECS

CREATE TABLE #TB_SPECS
(
  STRING_VALUE NVARCHAR(MAX)
)
INSERT #TB_SPECS(STRING_VALUE) 
VALUES('​​​​​​​SingLe heat-treated and fully thru-hardened for toughness, these guards')	

select * from #TB_SPECS

Output:- 

???????SingLe heat-treated and fully thru-hardened for toughness, these guards

Answer 1

User281315223 posted

Did you copy this value from somewhere? It looks like there are some non-printable characters that are being recognized that correspond to the '?' characters you are seeing:

You should be fine once you remove those. 

Answer 2

User-719153870 posted

Hi nagarajasia,

Really don't know about the root cause of this issue. Can someone please shed light on this problem?

This is because you are inserting non-unicode string literal into unicode field.  There are some non-unicode characters before "SingLe" as @Rion  mentioned.

To solved this problem, you can put an "N" before whatever you want to insert:

if OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#TB_SPECS') is not null drop table #TB_SPECS

CREATE TABLE #TB_SPECS
(
  STRING_VALUE NVARCHAR(MAX)
)
INSERT #TB_SPECS(STRING_VALUE) 
VALUES(N'​​​​​​​SingLe heat-treated and fully thru-hardened for toughness, these guards')	

select * from #TB_SPECS

Best Regard,

Yang Shen

Answer 3

User-1284851152 posted

@ Rion Yes I copied the value from an excel sheet.

Thanks for your reply. I overwhelmed to see you answering my question in Microsoft forums, as I have already read plenty of your articles in the CSharpCorner website (Awesome articles). 

I must say that something I have learned today. Thanks once again.

Answer 4

User-1284851152 posted

@Yang Shen

Thanks for your reply. Your answer has opened doors to learn further for me. Thanks once again.