How would I change an Access DB from ISO-8859-2 to UTF-8 in a connection string?

Question

I have a database in ISO-8859-2 format, but I need to create XML in UTF-8. This means that I must encode the database before prinitng in UTF-8. I know very little about ASP.Net, so I'm hoping someone can help.

In PHP I would do something like this:

db_connect();
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'UTF8'");
mysql_query("SET character_set_client='UTF8'");

This is my ASP.Net code for database connection:

 'CONNECTION TO DATABASE
 dim dbconn,sql,dbcomm
 dbconn=New OleDbConnection("Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;" & _
      "Data Source=" & Server.MapPath("../baze/test.mdb"))

 dbconn.Open()          

 sql="SELECT * FROM nekretnine, tipovinekretnina WHERE nekretnine.idtipnekretnine = tipovinekretnina.idtipnekretnine ORDER BY nekretnine.idnekretnine"
 dbcomm=New OleDbCommand(sql,dbconn)
 dbread=dbcomm.ExecuteReader()

 while dbread.Read()

Where and how do I encode to UTF-8?

Answer 1

Assuming you have a value string in str, this is the pure-.NET way of doing this.

var encoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-2");

var bytes = System.Text.Encoding.Convert(encoding, System.Text.Encoding.Default, encoding.GetBytes(str));

var newString = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetString(bytes);

Answer 2

The .NET Framework's internal string type is UTF-16. All database access will convert to UTF-16 so that you can view the data appropriately: the database, or the OLE DB provider, will convert to UTF-16.

The XML writer classes (you are using XmlDocument or XmlWriter, right?) will then convert to UTF-8 on the output.

Basically, you shouldn't need to do anything extra.