How to store multi byte characters in SQL Server database using CodeIgniter

Question

I'm using MS SQL Server and CodeIgniter 2 with Active Record for a project I'm working on, and I just stumbled upon this issue:

When I submit a form that contains Chinese or Hindi characters, I store it in a table, and when I view it all I get are question marks. If I try English or Greek characters, everything seems to work fine.

The reason I believe this is something to do with the PHP I'm writing, is because if I copy-paste the chinese text directly in SQL Server Management Studio, all values are stored and displayed perfectly, both on the SQL Studio, and the web application.

These are the db settings I'm using:

$db['local']['dbdriver'] = 'sqlsrv';
$db['local']['dbprefix'] = '';
$db['local']['pconnect'] = FALSE;
$db['local']['db_debug'] = TRUE;
$db['local']['cache_on'] = FALSE;
$db['local']['cachedir'] = '';
$db['local']['char_set'] = 'utf8';
$db['local']['dbcollat'] = 'utf8_general_ci';
$db['local']['swap_pre'] = '';
$db['local']['autoinit'] = TRUE;
$db['local']['stricton'] = FALSE;

This is the structure of the table I'm testing on right now:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[languages](
    [id] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
    [language] [nvarchar](1024) NULL,
    [language_local] [nvarchar](1024) NULL,
    [lang_code] [nvarchar](100) NULL,
    [core] [bit] NULL,
 CONSTRAINT [PK_languages] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED 
(
    [id] ASC
)WITH (PAD_INDEX  = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE  = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF,         ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS  = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS  = ON) ON [PRIMARY]
) ON [PRIMARY]

GO

And this is my charset encoding in config.php

$config['charset'] = 'utf-8';

New troubleshooting data

I tried to save the following string through my form: Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

CodeIgniter replied with this error:

An error occurred translating the query string to UTF-16: No mapping for the Unicode character exists in the target multi-byte code page. .

This doesn't appear when I try to store Chinese characters Thank you in advance :)

Answer 1

Try to convert your input with iconv() before insert to db :

$input = iconv('','UTF-8',$str);