From: Lou Vanek <vanek@...>
Date: 2006-01-12T03:18:20+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby-odbc -- Strange Chaning of Special Character in Result Set

I'm not familiar with FreeTDS, but Google says that some versions of FreeTDS
have problems with extended ascii:

   http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/freetds/2003q2/012800.html
   http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/freetds/2003q2/012791.html
   http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/history/topic.php/10268497-1.html

so it appears that if you are running FreeTDS .61, extended ascii is broken.

Your FreeTDS log should show the error. What does your log say?
[http://www.freetds.org/userguide/logging.htm]


    On retrieving data from the server, FreeTDS substitutes an ASCII '?'
    in the character's place, and emits a warning message stating that
    some characters could not be converted.
    [http://www.freetds.org/userguide/nonwestern.htm]

This explains why '150' is mysteriously being converted to 63 (i.e. '?').






Ben Gribaudo wrote:

> Hi Lou,
> 
> Thanks for your reply.
> 
> 
>>I recommend sending your output to a file and doing something similar to
>>what I've done to see exactly what's being sent back from odbc instead
>>of relying on a (possibly lying) terminal. It would also have been helpful to
>>know which database [and version] you used.
> 
> 
> I'm not concerned about if/how the terminal outputs the character--that
> output was for illustration only. The "Char Code" line is the one of
> interest. In my original script, shouldn't the terminal output this
> number correctly?
> 
> Running your script and looking at the output file still shows a char
> code of 63 for select char(150) and 150 for select ascii(char(150)).
> :-(
> 
> I'm using MS Sql Server 7.0, FreeTDS and Ruby-ODBC.
> 
> 
>>I didn't get any warnings when compiling ruby-odbc, but I was using gcc 34.4.
> 
> 
> Christian (author of ruby-odbc) communicated with me about this and
> provided a solution to the signedness difference error. Thank you,
> Christian!
> 
> Ben