problems with names containing á é ö and such...

[tradmusic]

I'm using SQL database, ASP/VBScript / DWMX.

Some of our columns contain text that has accented characters - á é ö (and
others). These are mainly artists/groups names. For example, We have an A-Z
links section. Lets say we chose A.

This produces a list of all artists and groups beginning with the letter A,
however it ignores artists whose first letter is Á? Is this an encoding
issue? What do we need to do to sort this out?

Thanks
Nath.

[cmbergin]

All of your special characters showed up as little squares here on the web
forums. I'd definitely say it's an encoding issue. Also, make sure you're
using a Unicode font (not all of them are) when using Unicode characters. I
don't know the proper encoding myself, but I bet it's not hard to look up.

[tradmusic]

Thanks CM,

I'll look into that. I think it's something along the lines of URL.Encode
or HTML.Encode?

Will post the solution - if i find one!
Nath.

"cmbergin" <webfor...@macromedia.com> wrote in message
news:c374o1$9l2$1...@forums.macromedia.com...

[Chris In Madison]

First thing I'd do is make sure your database fields are set to nchar,
nvarchar, or ntext. This will account for unicode characters in the
database. Then, most likely, your *sorts* should work fine. However, in
the eyes of the database, a and á and ä and â are all different characters.
So if your SQL query is "thisfield LIKE 'a%'", then you're going to miss out
on all those other entries with variations on that "a". If you have those
special characters in your search requirements, you'll probably have to find
some way of dealing with them outside of the database. Perhaps checking for
a vowel as the first letter and checking for all variations on the vowel
before passing it to the database for searches.

Best regards,
Chris

[Julian Roberts]

Consider this code

<%
for i=1 to 200
Response.Write i & " - " & Chr(i) & "<br>"
next
%>

You can then find the number for your special character (x) and have code
like

where foo like Chr(x) & '%'

--
Jules
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