Displaying Large Text with PHP/ASP from SQL

This is an issue I faced with both PHP and ASP. When I set a field type in SQL to varchar(max) or some large amount, when I attempt to display this information via the server-side language, nothing displays.

I found online an explanation for ASP:

After some testing I found there are no SQL Server 2005 data types
that can be read by an ASP page that hold more than 8000 characters. I
speculate that the 2-byte field length indicator is not read by ASP.
Maybe the field length of the old Access memo data type was encoded
differently. - kirkatsfw-ga

I also found something similar related to PHP. My solution in both cases was as stated above, to reduce the limit for the field to something that the server-side languages could deal with. This was the case with both PHP and ASP along with both MySQL and MSSQL.