Thursday, June 21, 2007

Adding UNICODE data (Urdu/Arabic or RTL data) into Database

Problem:

Adding unicode data to the database produces weird question marks '????? ???? ??????' on output or displaying data.

Solution:

We can very easily correct this from the query analyzer using the "N" prefix, which instructs SQL server to treat this data as unicode. For example, the following code works perfectly.

sample query

update tblUrduArticles
set UrduDesc = N'بول کہ لب آزاد ھیں تیرے'
where ArticleID = 1296

I've checked it sql server 2000 successfully, hopefully it will work for you as well.

Regards

Imran Saami