Dear All,

As so often playing arounf with character sets.

Using FB 1.5rc4 and plain ISQL on W2K.

Look at this session log:
(the first insert puts german umlauts and sharp-s
in the table, in case the characters got lost in
your email client or at yahoo)

SQL> create table temp (col char(8) character set DOS437);
SQL> insert into temp values (_DOS437'ÄÖÜäöüß');
SQL> insert into temp values (_DOS437'ABCDEF');
SQL> select col, cast (col as char(8) character set OCTETS) from temp;

COL CAST
======== ================

ÄÖÜäöüß FFFFFFFFFFFFFF20
ABCDEF 4142434445462020

Questions:
1) The useful magic of displaying character set OCTETS
in hexadecimal, is this done by ISQL or in the server?
2) All bytes > 0x7F are displayed as 0xFF - is there a hidden
reason? Otherwise I'd tempted to file a bug report on this as
it is somewhat unpractical.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi