Changing MS SQL Collation To Store Different Types Of Characters

Question

Hi everyone,

I am working on a website where the content has to be displayed in English, Polish, Slovak and Czech. Currently, everytime a special character used in the non-english languages (such as Á or â), it displays as just a normal A or a. I've traced the problem down to the database. Currently the collation is "Latin1_General_CI_AS", and when the special foreign characters are put on to the server, the server saves it as a normal standard english character.

I've looked at several answers, but most seem to change the database collation within the SQL query, and this is something that isn't feasible for me to do (due to the size of the site). What I'm trying to do is find a collation for the database that will allow the foreign characters to be saved as well as the english characters (a bit like how UTF-8 works in HTML).

Does anyone know how I could do this? Or another way to use foreign characters on the page.

Many thanks, Michael

Answer 1

If webclients OS or webbrowser does not have compatible/close fonts to render such symbols correctly, your webserver should upload them to client(s)

But this is probable only for very ancient browsers. In your case, the most probable reasons is that you did not configure your OS or webbrowser to use available fonts.

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky