Getting data with UTF-8 charset from MSSQL server using PHP FreeTDS extension

I had a similar problem and tried all settings i could find on the web - in vain.

In my case the problem was the configuration of FreeTDS itself. On Linux the file is /etc/freetds/freetds.conf

I had to change the Version to 7.0 (maybe other numbers work, too. i just tried 7.0)

[global]
    # TDS protocol version
    tds version = 7.0

After this, the driver seemed to accept changes of the charset like.

ini_set('mssql.charset', 'UTF-8');

Btw: the change immediately is in effect, no need to restart anything afterwards

MSSQL and UTF-8 are quite a pain in the ... sometimes. I had to convert it manually. The problem: MSSQL doesn't actually know and support UTF-8.

Convert from database value to UTF-8:

mb_detect_encoding($value, mb_detect_order(), true) === 'UTF-8' ? $value : mb_convert_encoding($value, 'UTF-8');

Converting from UTF-8 to database value:

mb_convert_encoding($value, 'UCS-2LE', mb_detect_encoding($value, mb_detect_order(), true));

Fortunately I was using Doctrine so all I had was to create a custom StringType implementation.

If you use freeTDS, you should change below lines on /etc/freetds/freetds.conf:

[global]
# TDS protocol version
tds version = 4.2

To this:

[global]
# TDS protocol version
tds version = 8.0
;tds version = 4.2

and finally add this line:

# set charset
client charset = UTF-8

** clinet charset is in global [scope]

In your queries, you should use N character. like this:

$query = "INSERT INTO dbo.SMSOutbox (StationID, Dest, Text) VALUES ";
   $query .= '(';
   $query .= "'" . $this->stationId . "', ";
   $query .= "'" . $this->destination . "', ";
   $query .= "N'" . $this->text . "'";
   $query .= ')';