Hi Zitoune,

1. You should look into Free TDS and DBD::Sybase - see Re: SQL Server freeTDS walkthrough?
2. The character set returned by SQL Server is UTF-8, so anything that is not ASCII is not represented by a single byte - you can convert these to ISO-8859-1 or something else if this doen't work for you.

Update: forgot to mention that this assumes you're on some Un*x platfom (I implemented this on Sun Solaris some 2 years ago). For Windows you may be better off using ODBC.

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Cheers, Joe