title: Storing Chinese, Korean, English, etc in MS SQL through SQL Express
body: <p>I am using MS SQL 2008 Express to connect to a shared MS SQL 2008 server where I have a database. The default collation for the DB is currently <code>SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS</code>. Ultimately, I would like to store English, Korean, Chinese, and any other language imaginable in the DB. I have started off by using the following SQL code (that I found here: <a href="http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/transactsql/thread/5d2ea1a2-32e1-4a82-b6e3-17d2b898babc/">http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/transactsql/thread/5d2ea1a2-32e1-4a82-b6e3-17d2b898babc/</a>) to test things out:</p>
  
  <pre><code>create table zhongwen(mingzi nvarchar(10))
  go
  insert into zhongwen values (N'有方')
  insert into zhongwen values (N'李杰')
  insert into zhongwen values (N'空炮鸡蛋')
  go
  select * from zhongwen
  go
  create procedure zhongwenfind 
   (@mingzi nvarchar(10))
   AS
   SELECT mingzi FROM zhongwen 
   WHERE mingzi  = @mingzi  
  go
  exec zhongwenfind N'李杰'
  go
  drop table zhongwen
  go
  drop procedure zhongwenfind
  go
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When I run this code in MS SQL 2008 Express, the results display only several thin boxes. If I copy a set of the thin boxes and paste them in here (the stack overflow ask a question textarea), they show up as proper characters (here I go: 空炮鸡蛋). Is it possible to set MS SQL 2008 Express to display them correctly?</p>
  
  <p>Much more importantly, when I run my PHP site that is ultimately supposed to display the characters correctly to the public, I only get question marks (????). I am using <code>mssql_query()</code> to query the DB. I have the following code at the top of my HTML5 HEAD:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>...and the following code in my PHP:</p>
  
  <pre><code>header('Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>...but I only see the question marks. So, to sum it all up, 2 questions:</p>
  
  <p>1) How do I make this display correctly in MS SQL 2008 Express?</p>
  
  <p>2) How do I make this display correctly in PHP / HTML?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance!</p>