Triple Byte Characters with NVarChar

Question

Hi all,

I have a question regarding triple-byte characters.  I am already using NVarChar for my column data types and I have have a client who says they are going to be sending me triple-byte data.  Will I have any issues loading triple-byte data?  I was reading and saw that tripe-byte is supported under the UTF-8 specification so I am guessing it should not be a problem. 

Thanks for any information!!

Answer 1

AFAIK,

Usually triple byte chracter is for UTF-8 encoding and currenly SQL Server does not support UTF-8 natively.

SQL Server has NCHAR and NVARCHAR data types, which supports unicode (two bytes) characters.

Answer 2

Good Golly!!

I sure hope someone can suggest a work-around?  We have a .Net application reading in this data in and bulk inserting it into the database.  Should we try to convert it to another character set on the way in?

Answer 3

I think your answer is here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2300337/storing-multibyte-in-sql-server

Although there may be other ways to convert the mbc into Unicode

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5z097dxa.aspx

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Chuck Pedretti | Magenic – North Region | magenic.com