Converting to or from Unitext

You can implicitly convert any character or binary datatype to unitext, as well as explicitly convert to and from unitext to other datatypes. The conversion result, however, is limited to the maximum length of the destination datatype.

When a unitext value cannot fit the destination buffer on a Unicode character boundary, data is truncated. If you have enabled enable surrogate processing, the unitext value is never truncated in the middle of a surrogate pair of values, which means that fewer bytes may be returned after the datatype conversion. For example, if a unitext column ut in table tb stores the string “U+0041U+0042U+00c2” (U+0041 representing the Unicode character “A”), this query returns the value “AB” if the server’s character set is UTF-8, because U+00C2 is converted to 2-byte UTF-8 0xc382:
select convert(char(3), ut) from tb

Conversion

Datatypes

These datatypes convert implicitly to unitext

char, varchar, unichar, univarchar, binary, varbinary, text, image

These datatypes convert implicitly from unitext

text, image

These datatypes convert explicitly from unitext

char, varchar, unichar, univarchar, binary, varbinary

The alter table modify command does not support text, image, or unitext columns to be the modified column. To migrate from a text to a unitext column:

Parent topic: text, image, and unitext Datatypes