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.
Best Answer
I had a similar problem recently.
In your freetds.conf file you'll want an entry similar to the following:
client charset is the important bit here.
I was doing this with Perl from Linux, I expect UTF-8 is the best choice here as well, given Perl is the Client