Issam, the NONE characterset doesn't "know" how to handle the è in "Absence de germes pathogènes". There is this byte with the hex value E9, but this could be any character.
I assume you used Windows 1252 or ISO 8859-1 to store this string in your NONE field (that's because these are used for western European languages like French). When you want to convert this to UTF-8 (which is Unicode, where the character is called 00E8 LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE), you must tell Firebird how to treat the string. You can do this by typecasting: cast (myfield as varchar(100) character set win1252) So now Firebird treats this NONE string as a WIN1252 string and then it knows how to convert all the international characters (like é, è, ä, ê etc.) to Unicode. HTH Best Regards Stefan -- Stefan Heymann, Tübingen, Germany
