Arghh, seems I spoke too soon, too... now that I'm realizing you're actually using the DBD::ODBC driver, not the DBD::mysql one, as I thought ;(

In other words, the driver specific attribute mysql_enable_utf8 ¹ most likely won't apply here... But maybe there's some similar option with ODBC (?) However, a quick string search through the docs for "utf"/"unicode"/"wide" doesn't find any mention of either of those :( This usually means that it's (a) not supported at all, or (b) should work out of the box... Let's hope it's closer to the latter!

I'm afraid I can't help you much with this any more, as I haven't really done a lot with databases under Windows myself (I'm more of a 'unix gal'...).

Well, I'd do some more googling on the issue of "ODBC + utf8 / unicode", or some such. And if it should really turn out to be unsupported (which I can't quite believe), then you could still try to use the DBD::mysql driver instead, which - as I understand things - should be available for Windows as well...

If this doesn't get you anywhere, I'd just start a new thread here -- I guess there aren't many Monks reading "Re^N:" levels with N > 4, in old threads ...

Good luck anyway!

¹ which you would have specified like this, for example

$dbh= DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:dbname;mysql_enable_utf8=1", ...)
or
$dbh->{mysql_enable_utf8} = 1;
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