Carlos,

Depending on what you actually need, there are several ways to accomplish 
what you want.

1) You could leave the databases as they are (DBF format with standard OEM 
   characters), and have your application use Set(_SET_CHARSET, CHARSET_OEM) 
   before reading or writing any data from/to those databases if you use an 
   ANSI default setting in your application. This will prevent any implicit 
   character conversions. You can do that even more specifically only before 
   accessing any fields that contain I2Bin() data, while letting the other 
   fields be (implicitly) converted.

1a) If that is too cumbersome, and you don't want to switch the Character 
    Set all the time, but leave your application in ANSI mode, you could use 
    DbeInfo(COMPONENT_DATA, DBFDBE_ANSI, .t.) before opening the database. 
    This will also prevent any implicit character conversions. If you then 
    need to explicitly convert the data from a particular field, you can use 
    the ConvToAnsiCP() function.

2) You can also convert the databases permanently to FOX format, using the 
   OEM character set (and Code Page 437), while converting the fields with 
   I2Bin() data to binary fields (using the "X" field type with DbStruct()). 
   This will create a database with a modified (FOX) header, but the data is 
   otherwise exactly the same as in the original (DBF format) file. The only 
   thing you need to change in your demo program to accomplish this, is to 
   remove (or remark out) line 54, which contains: 
   Set(_SET_CHARSET, CHARSET_ANSI).

2a) You can also convert the databases permanently to FOX format, using the 
    ANSI character set (and Code Page 1252), while converting the fields 
    with I2Bin() data to binary fields (using the "X" field type with 
    DbStruct()). This will create a database with a modified (FOX) header, 
    and the character fields (that were not changed to binary) will have 
    been converted to ANSI. The only thing you need to change in your demo 
    program to accomplish this, is to (leave line 54 as it is, but) add 
    somewhere between line 62 (after the DbCreate()) and line 81 (before the 
    loop in which you write data to the new database) the following line:
    Set(_SET_CHARSET, CHARSET_OEM).

There are actually some additional options, but I guess you can figure those 
out by yourself. Just keep in mind that the implicit and explicit character 
conversion between OEM and ANSI is not always reversible, so you probably 
should try and limit those conversions as much as possible and only convert 
characters when absolutely necessary.

Also, please keep in mind that characters displayed by an XbpCRT() object 
will always be in the OEM charset, while characters displayed by an XbpSLE() 
object will always be in the ANSI charset. Depending on your active CharSet 
setting, implicit conversions might be performed, before something is 
displayed in one or the other.

Hope that helps,

Andreas

Andreas Gehrs-Pahl
Absolute Software, LLC

phone: (989) 723-9927
email: Andreas@AbsoluteSoftwareLLC.com
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