PHP, MS SQL Server and UTF-8

I was faced with the task of setting up the system to work with Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The system should support multilingualism, as a result, all string data should be stored in fields like nvarchar and ntext. The problem turned out to be that php_mssql.dll is not able to work with these fields, and to use PDO and SQL Server Driver for PHP, you would have to rewrite a lot of code.

Solving the problem was not difficult ...


To access SQL Server we will use the FreeTDS library.
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1. Download the extension for php and copy the dll to the extension_path folder.

http://download.moodle.org/download.php/dblib/php52/DBLIB_TS.zip (Thread Safe)
http://download.moodle.org/download.php/dblib/php52/DBLIB_NOTS.zip (Non Thread Safe)

2. Disable extension = php_mssql.dll in php.ini

3. Install extension = php_dblib.dll in php.ini

4. Create a file c: \ freetds.conf

[global]
host = xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (ip of the MSSQL server)
port = 1433
client charset = UTF-8
tds version = 8.0
text size = 20971520

5. Everything. Now all mssql_ * functions should work correctly with these types of fields.

ps To connect to SQLServer Express, you do not need to add / SQLEXPRESS to the host name.