text decoding from dataset, hmm... help appreciated.

[Peter Row]

Hi all,

Here is my problem:

I have a SQL Server 2000 DB with various NVarChar, NText fields in its
tables.
For some stupid reason the data was inserted into these fields in UTF8
encoding.

However when you retrieve these values into a dataset and ToString() them
some
characters come out as garbage.

So therefore I have started writing a throw away app that will go through
all the
relevant tables and fields decoding and then updating with unicode values.

However I'm a bit confused and stuck. There seem to be lots of classes that
sound exactly like what I want however they either don't convert to unicode
or they expect the data to be in a byte array. Trying to convert the dataset
values from object to a byte array causes a invalid cast exception.

Any ideas or links to detail info about the encoding stuff would be much
appreciated.

Regards,
Peter

[Cor Ligthert]

Hi Peter,

This are things for Jay B. Harlow or for Jon Skeet, Jon is active in the
newsgroup.

microsoft.public.dotnet.general (and in C#)

Maybe you can ask your question also there, because Jay, answers a lot
however as he sometimes says has not always that much time.

Cor