At 12:23 PM 8/05/2009, you wrote:

>--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, "Alan McDonald" <alan@...> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > Thank you both for your help.
>> >
>> > Do you think this would work if I saved the contents of this field to
>> > disk for each record, recreated the blob as text type, and then loaded
>> > the blob field with the files from disk?
>> >
>> > Would this give me a different result than creating a new field and
>> > moving the data (update table set newfield = oldfield)?
>> >
>>
>> clarify the content for us.
>> Is there UTF-16 characters in this content?
>> or is the xml header something you have copied from somewhere and it's just
>> for transport?
>> Can you send me one entire field content?
>> Alan
>>
>
>The entire contents of the XML are exactly as follows:

But not in this environment! ;-) You pasted it into your email client's editor, which kindly converted it to rich text.

If you have the actual file, open it with Notepad and then open the Save As.. dialog. In the drop-down box, it's current encoding should be highlighted.

It's probably not as reliable a test as opening it in a more Unicode-aware editor, such as NotepadPlusPlus. TIP: If you don't have this editor then Google for it - it's a must-have if you're handling XML files and need to find out anything about their encoding, platform origin, etc. It's NOT an XML editor though.

hth
./heLen