How do I insert Chinese characters into a SQLExpress text field?

Question

How do I insert Chinese characters into a SQLExpress text field? I'm using SQL Express from VS 2008. When I add Chinese characters, either via an import app I wrote or by pasting them in from the data view inside Visual Studio, they end up as question marks.

Answer 1

Be sure you made your column type nchar, nvarchar or ntext. So you can store Unicode. It is all rather well described here...

Answer 2

Just add an 'N' before your text delimiter in the INSERT/UPDATE statement for fields of the nchar/nvarchar/ntext type:

INSERT INTO myTable (myField1, myField2) VALUES (N'any chinese character',N'any arabic character')