PHP + SQL Server - How to set charset for connection?

Question

I\'m trying to store some data in a SQL Server database through php.

Problem is that special chars aren\'t converted properly. My app\'s charset is iso-8859-1 and th

Answer 1

If you are using TDS protocol version 7 or above, ALL communications over the wire are converted to UCS2. The server will convert from UCS2 into whatever the table or column collation is set to, unless the column is nvarchar or ntext. You can store UTF-8 into regular varchar or text, you just have to use a TDS protocol version lower than 7, like 6.0 or 4.2. The only drawback with this method is that you cannot query any nvarchar, ntext, or sys.* tables (I think you also can't do any CAST()ing) - as the server refuses to send anything that might possibly be converted to UTF-8 to any client using protocol version lower than 7.

It is not possible to avoid converting character sets when using TDS protocol version 7 or higher (roughly equivalent to MSSQL 2005 or newer).