Character set problems can arise when servers have different or incompatible character sets.
8-bit or multibyte data is corrupted when replication is taking place between a multibyte and a single-byte data server.
Sybase does not support any character set conversion between single and multibyte systems; it simply passes the data and object names as is. Since 8-bit and multibyte characters are character-set-specific, their semantics change after replication.
Character data in the replicate data server has some question marks (?) substituted for non-ASCII characters, even though the primary and replicate data servers use compatible character sets. Also, object names originating at a remote site have some questions mark (?) characters.
This happens because different character sets, even compatible ones, have some unique characters. When trying to convert a character that does not exist in the replicate data server’s character set, a question mark (?) is substituted for the unrecognized character.
If you are replicating between compatible character sets (for example, iso-1 and cp850), make sure that your object names and character data do not include any of the characters that are not common to both character sets.