Andreas,

> Here my thoughts about it:
>
> What about TIB_Column.AsWideString?

Not sure this would be a solution.

> And if we need a UTF8 string, we could
> add a method AsUtf8 to TIB_Column?!

No need to do that.

Just set TIB_Connection.CharSet to UTF-8 and then use AsRawString.

Regards,
Jason Wharton