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SQL Server FAQ - Casting Strings to Wrong Code Pages

By: FYIcenter.com

(Continued from previous topic...)

What Happens If Strings Are Casted into Wrong Code Pages?

In SQL Server, different collations may use different code pages. For example:

• Albanian_CI_AI_KS_WS - Albanian, Code page 1250.
• Arabic_CI_AS_KS_WS - Arabic, Code page 1256.
• French_CI_AI - French, Code page 1252.
• Korean_Wansung_BIN - Korean-Wansung, Code page 949.
• SQL_Latin1_General_CP1250_CI_AS - Latin1-General, Code page 1250.

If you are casting a string of characters from one code page to a different code page, some character will be converted to similar. For example

PRINT 'Français: eéèê-aà-oô'; 
  -- The default code page

PRINT 'Français: eéèê-aà-oô' 
  COLLATE French_CI_AI; -- Code page 1252

PRINT 'Français: eéèê-aà-oô' 
  COLLATE Polish_CI_AS; -- Code page 1250

PRINT 'Français: eéèê-aà-oô' 
   COLLATE Cyrillic_General_CI_AS; -- Code page 1256
GO

Français: eéèê-aà-oô
Français: eéèê-aà-oô
Français: eéee-aa-oô
Francais: eeee-aa-oo

(Continued on next topic...)

1. What Is a Constant or Literal?
2. How To Write Character String Constants or Literals?
3. What Is a Collation?
4. How To Specify the Collation for a Character Data Type?
5. What Happens If Strings Are Casted into Wrong Code Pages?
6. How To Find Out What Is the Default Collation in a Database?
7. How Fixed Length Strings Are Truncated and Padded?
8. How To Enter Unicode Character String Literals?
9. How To Enter Binary String Literals?
10. How To Enter Date and Time Literals?
11. Why I Can Not Enter 0.001 Second in Date and Time Literals?
12. What Happens If Date-Only Values Are Provided as Date and Time Literals?
13. What Happens If Time-Only Values Are Provided as Date and Time Literals?
14. What Are Out-of-Range Errors with Date and Time Literals?
15. What Happens If an Integer Is Too Big for INT Date Type?
16. How Extra Digits Are Handled with NUMERIC Data Type Literals?
17. How REAL and FLOAT Literal Values Are Rounded?
18. What Are the Underflow and Overflow Behaviors on FLOAT Literals?