Unicode and Sybase univarchar

I'm working on an i18n project, and we use Sybase (sigh).

Newer versions of Sybase have built-in support for Unicode with the 
univarchar (and other uni*) type.

However, it seems like DBD::Sybase doesn't have any support for this.

Specifically, if I take a Perl unicode string (utf8 flag is on) and insert 
it in a univarchar column, it seems to be inserted as raw bytes (or 
something).

What's really bizarre is that when I select the value back I get something 
like "0065006d00200064006100730068003a002000e200800094".

Yes, that's a literal string containing a series of 2-digit hex numbers!

I can translate this back to Perl unicode with this madness:

     my $chars = do {
         use bytes;

         join q{}, map { chr( eval '0x' . $_ ) } $fromdb =~ /(....)/g;
     };

     my $unicode = decode( 'utf8', $chars );

So the data is there, but not in a very usable form.

Has anyone researched or solved this problem?

Michael Peppler, if you're reading this, is there any work on supporting 
Perl's unicode format transparently in DBD::Sybase?

My employer might be able to pay to have this work done, if you're 
interested. Alternately, maybe you could give me some hints and I could 
try to figure it out.


-dave

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