How to read Arabic characters from varchar datatype?

Question

I have an old system that uses varchar datatype in its database to store Arabic names, now the names appear in the database like this:

  "ãíÓÇÁ ÇáãÈíÖíä"

Now I am building a new system using VB.NET, how can I read these names to appear in Arabic characters?

Also I need to point out here that the old system even it stores the data as I mentioned earlier it converts the characters in a correct format.

How to display it properly in the new system and in the SQL Server Management Studio?

yes that is correct. how do they read the characters right?? — Majdi Asha, Apr 28 '13 at 07:21
OK, I flagged it to be migrated to [dba.stackexchange](http://dba.stackexchange.com/faq), where you can get better answers. — Mahmoud Gamal, Apr 28 '13 at 07:25
Is the collation set correctly in the database for the relevant columns? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7781103/sql-server-set-character-set-not-collation — Andrew Morton, Apr 28 '13 at 15:30

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:24

1

have you tried nvarchar? you may find some usefull information at the link below

When must we use NVARCHAR/NCHAR instead of VARCHAR/CHAR in SQL Server?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:24

Community

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answered Apr 28 '13 at 20:27

Mo Patel

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 19 '13 at 07:57

I faced the same Problem, and I solved it by two steps:

1.change the datatype of the column in DB into nvarchar

2.use the encoding to change the data into Arabic

I used the following function

     private string GetDataWithArabic(string srcData)
    {
        Encoding iso = Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1");
        Encoding unicode = Encoding.Default;
        byte[] unicodeBytes = iso.GetBytes(srcData);
        return unicode.GetString(unicodeBytes);
    }

but make sure you use this method once on DB data, because it will corrupt the data if used twice

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 28 '13 at 20:15

0

I think your answer is here: "storing and retrieving non english characters" http://aalamrangi.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/storing-and-retrieving-non-english-unicode-characters-hindi-czech-arabic-etc-in-sql-server/

answered Apr 28 '13 at 20:15

Ian P

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How to read Arabic characters from varchar datatype?

3 Answers3