What does a Square box in data field mean in a SQL Server 2005 table?

  • A co-worker is telling me that there is a square character in the field of most records in a table she has. She said that this means the data is encrypted. Is this true? I cannot find this verified anywhere.

  • not nessesarily, it could just be a invalid char to which there is no local code page varient for and it displays a box to show you something is there. i commonly see this when people store special characters in varchar columns instead of nvarchar columns

  • if it's in an nvarchar column then soembody forgot to put the N' identifier in the insert statement and you have non-ascii characters stored in your string in unusable format

    MVDBA

  • Hi Mike,

    The column is (varchar(20), not null). I do not recall ever seeing a square character in a data field. So I could not dispute that this means encrypted. Thanks for the information.

    Charlie

  • try this and see if it matches

    create table #temp (mydata varchar(20))

    insert into #temp select 'ABCDEF?/??GHIJK'

    select * from #temp

    drop table #temp

    MVDBA

  • Hi Michael,

    I did as you suggested. The data field in the table reflects "ABCDEF?/??GHIJK".

    Charlie

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