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Wednesday, October 31, 2012 4:17 PM
I'm working with some scripts in SQL Server Management Studio which adds some special ascii characters to some string variables and then passes them to stored procedures. In SSMS 2008, the text editor displays the special characters in the using the 437 code page, but SSMS 2012 does not. I've changed fonts in SSMS 2012 to use the same fonts as 2008, but that still doesn't solve the problem.
The result panes in both tools will show the special characters when selecting the strings, it's just the text editor that is unable to display the characters in 2012. Even copy/pasting from the results pane to the editor won't show the characters.
My question is how can I get SSMS 2012 to display these characters? an example character would be char(15) which would display the sun-like character.
Thanks!
Thursday, November 1, 2012 2:24 AM ✅Answered | 1 vote
I dug into this one a bit tonight and it appears that when SSMS made the switch to using the Visual Studio Shell in SQL Server 2008 R2 as opposed to the original "homemade" editor from 2008 and prior, this functionality was lost/not provided with the new shell. By leveraging the VS shell and the dedicated resources of the VS team, the SQL Server manageability team was able to free up a lot of resources to work on other features/enhancements, but there end up being a couple of these scenarios that are not provided with the VS shell. It looks like there was a connect bug filed in 2010 that has 6 votes as of today. The bug was triaged as won't fix with an explanation around the shell and other priorities.
http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/627037/ssms-doesnt-show-low-ascii-32
That being said, it seems like the common method for querying low and higher end ASCII characters from the extended ASCII character set is by using the specific char number as you seem to be doing (ex: char(15) in your example). Here is an external blog with a nice query for querying the lower end of the ASCII set that doesn't display in SSMS:
http://thecurlybrace.blogspot.com/2010/06/queryig-extended-ascii-characters-from.html
Thanks,
Sam Lester (MSFT)
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Thursday, November 1, 2012 3:10 PM
Sam, Thanks for the quick response on this and finding the connect bug link. It's a shame it was deemed a no fix, but at least I know the answer now.
Thanks again!