Thanks for the response Helen,

> Character validity has to do with character set, not SQL dialect.

So how do I determine the character set and what characters are
valid?? I assumed it was a dialect problem, if it isn't then great,
but I still need to know what characters to filter out of my data to
make the conversion to work properly.

> Show the SQL statement you are using to "convert" and "insert".
> A blob is not a string. You can't convert a blob to a varchar
> without using an external function - but you still won't be able
> to use a character that is not in the character set.

I understand that a blob is not a string, I'm using a delphi
application to act as a datapump to convert the records. I'm using a
query to read each blob record, converting it to a string using
AsString and then reinserting it into the varchar(32000) using a
second sql statement (DSQL) component.

As I've stated before I'm looking for information about the validity
of certain characters and where I can find such information.

Out of 66000+ records this is the only one that fails (so far!).
After I posted yesterday I did some more work on the actual data and
it doesn't appear to be strictly the $ character thats causing the
problem. It seems to be the funny apostrophe character (hex 92)
that's in the data.

So once again, where can I find the information regarding valid
characters for either character sets or dialects for Firebird. I've
already looked through the Interbase docs that I've got but didn't
spot anything that looked helpful. Have I missed something in those docs?

Ryan.