Perl TDS character sets

Posted by skiphoppy on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by skiphoppy
Published on 2010-05-04T21:24:40Z Indexed on 2010/05/12 13:34 UTC
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I'm using the FreeTDS driver with DBD::Sybase, connecting to an MS SQL Server. When I query certain values of certain records, I get this error:

DBD::Sybase::st fetchrow_arrayref failed: OpenClient message: LAYER = (0) ORIGIN = (0) SEVERITY = (9) NUMBER = (99)
Server , database 
Message String: WARNING! Some character(s) could not be converted into client's character set. Unconverted bytes were changed to question marks ('?').

This seems to happen for records that contain special Windows character-set characters, such as curly quotes, copied and pasted from people's Outlook and Word messages.

Unfortunately, I do not have any control of this database; sanitizing the input on the way in is obviously the way to go, but is not available to me.

What FreeTDS settings do I need to change to be able to successfully query these records?

Additional information:

The query works fine from tsql. I only get this error through Perl's DBD::Sybase interface. (Should I test through something else? I don't have the expertise yet to install PHP or Python. I've got jTDS and can use it, but I think that's a completely different implementation, not an interface to FreeTDS.)

Adding

client charset = UTF-8

to my freetds.conf file results in "Out of memory!" printed to STDERR.

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