Daniel,

Just one more small suggestion until I must switch
back to day's work:

--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Daniel Albuschat

> it worked before to create a temporary field of type
> `varchar(40) character set iso8859_1', copy the contents of `text'
> to this temporary field with `update A set tmp_text=text;', drop text
> and recreate it with the right character set, and topy tmp_text to
> text again. This time I get the `Cannot transliterate [...]' error
> message again on the first update, though.

You can do 'forbidden' charset conversions by intermediary
casting to character set octets.

An intra-table example:

DDL:
SQL> create table t2 (c1 varchar(8) , c2 varchar(8) character set
ISO8859_1);

...inserting some non-ASCII chars into c1...

This will fail:
SQL> update t2 set c2 = c1;

This will work:
SQL> update t2 set c2 = cast (c1 as varchar(8) character set octets);

Regards,
Peter Jacobi