>> Therefore, I stored the contents as it is without encoding. It works
>> fine when I retrieve them using Delphi. That is the information
>> retrieved is same as clients submitted.
>>

BRS>     How does Delphi know the character set it must use to translate bytes into
BRS> characters?

Delphi does not know about it anything. Actually in Delphi characters
are byte, but in Java characters are true Unicode characters. Delphi
simply provides you those bytes without any conversion. It is only up
to you how displaying it. Fortunately visual controls can use
character sets, so that is the only place where you may change it. The
internal representation are pure 8 bit byte strings. Unfortunately...

daniel