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SQL Server FAQ - Entering Unicode Character String Literals

By: FYIcenter.com

(Continued from previous topic...)

How To Enter Unicode Character String Literals?

Unicode characters are multi-byte characters. They are very hard to be entered as string literals, because it requires:

• The SQL client tool to support Unicode characters. The command line tool 'sqlcmd' does not support Unicode. But SQL Server Management Studio does support Unicode.
• A special Unicode character input tool to allow you to enter multi-byte Unicode characters.

But if you know the code value of a Unicode character, you can enter it with the help of the NCHAR(int) function. For example:

-- A Unicode string of some interesting characters 
PRINT NCHAR(9733)+NCHAR(9734)+NCHAR(9792)+NCHAR(9794);
GO

Run the sample statement with SQL Server Management Studio, you should see some Unicode characters.

(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?