Working with characters from a different language

[bksqlman]

I am having trouble accessing data that is stored in different languages, and wondered if anyone here has an experience.
The data is stored in a SQL Server 2000 table, in a field of type nvarchar.
If I do a SELECT query through SQL Query Analyzer or MS Access, I see the data that is stored there properly. In this case, it is a string of Japanese characters.
What I want to do is write the data out to a text file.
I am creating the file as follows:

Dim fVTMFile As StreamWriter = File.CreateText("C:\test.txt")

And then I am attempting to write the values I retrive back in a Dataset as follows:

fVTMFile.WriteLine(MyDataRow2("line_text"))

Finally I flush and close the file as follows:

fVTMFile.Flush()
fVTMFile.Close()

When I deal with rows that are in the English language, it creates the file successfully.
But when I attempt to do it with rows that contain Japanese characters, I just get weird ASCII characters, not the proper Japanese characters that are stored in the table.
I tried using the StrConv function as such:

fVTMFile.WriteLine(StrConv(MyDataRow2("line_text"), VbStrConv.Katakana))

or

fVTMFile.WriteLine(StrConv(MyDataRow2("line_text"), VbStrConv.Hiragana))

But that did not work either.

Any ideas on how foreign language characters stored in SQL can be written to a text file in VB.Net 2003 would be appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[chiph]

Try opening the text file with an application that is Unicode aware. Notepad is one, but you might have to give it a little push to recognize the UTF-16 encoding that the text writer uses by default.

Another such is Unipad, which is a Unicode editor (very nice, but a little expensive for what it gives you).

Chip H.


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