Re: Unicode and Sybase univarchar

On Jun 3, 2010, at 7:29 PM, Michael Peppler wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Which version of Sybase, which version of Sybase OpenClient, and which version of DBD::Sybase?
> 
> Are you setting the connection charset to utf8 (in the connect() call?)
> 


I just gave this a try - I'm under linux, with ASE 15.5. I created a table with a univarchar column, entered some data via isql, then wrote a minimal perl script to fetch the data.

If I use a UTF8 locale (i.e. LANG=en_us.UTF8) I get the correct output.
If I don't I do not get the correct output, at least for rows where non-ascii data has been entered into the table.

I'm using DBD::Sybase 1.10.

Michael


> 
> 
> On Jun 3, 2010, at 5:22 PM, Dave Rolsky wrote:
> 
>> 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
>> 
>> /*============================================================
>> http://VegGuide.org               http://blog.urth.org
>> Your guide to all that's veg      House Absolute(ly Pointless)
>> ============================================================*/
>> 
> 
> --
> Michael Peppler
> Sybase on Linux FAQ: http://www.peppler.org/FAQ/linux.html
> 
> "A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author." -- S. C. Johnson   
> 
> 
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--
Michael Peppler
Sybase on Linux FAQ: http://www.peppler.org/FAQ/linux.html

"A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author." -- S. C. Johnson