G'day fredo2906,

It sounds like the open pragma would possibly resolve your issue.

If you need further help, please advise (as already requested) what specific encoding you're dealing with: "double-bytes charcters" [sic] is not particularly helpful.

Also, a small sample of the data could be useful. Please post this within <pre>...</pre> tags. Yes, that's contrary to other advice you may have read about posting data within <code>...</code> tags; however, Unicode characters are often rendered as character entity references when <code>...</code> tags are used. Your data won't wrap within <pre>...</pre> tags: one of the reasons I stressed "a small sample".