MS Access and Unicode (UTF8?)

Question

Hi --
I've been able to insert Arabic data into an MS Access table programmatically,
using SQL and the \u notation. For example:
insert into MY_TABLE values ('\u0663'); // arabic character
Then, I can read this data out using ResultSet's getCharacterStream method. The data comes back out fine, and can be displayed in a simple JTextField as Arabic.
(This required opening the database connection using the "charSet = "UTF8" property in the call to DriverManager's getConnection method.)
My problem is that I have another Access table in which the data was entered manually -- having set the Control Panel Regional setting to Arabic, and using the MS Office Tool language Arabic. The data looks fine in the Access GUI (the Arabic characters show up as Arabic).
However, when I read the data using the same method in the first example, I get back question marks. I guess there's something different about the way the data was encoded? I read that Access stores all character data as Unicode, but I'm not sure if that implies a particular encoding (such as UTF8) or not.
Is there any way to figure out how the manually-entered data is encoded?
Or is there something else I'm doing wrong?
Thanks for any help.
-J

Answer 1

However, when I read the data using the same method
in the first example, I get back question marks. I
guess there's something different about the way the
data was encoded? I read that Access stores all
character data as Unicode, but I'm not sure if that
implies a particular encoding (such as UTF8) or not.
Is there any way to figure out how the
manually-entered data is encoded?
Please see the article here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP052604161033.aspx
It suggests that Access stores data in UTF-16 or UTF-8 depending on whether a "Unicode Comression" feature is selected. So, I'd say you should try retrieving data from the other db as UTF-16.
Regards,
John O'Conner