note Anonymous Monk Also, find a way to look at (say in hexadecimal) what the actual bytes are, that are being <i>rendered as</i> "????" on output. (How are you generating that output? To the console; a web page?) Question-marks probably just mean a display-only issue: the bytes are there, and correct, but the system doesn't know what charset to use to display them. Could be that they're not there, though; that they've been corrupted earlier. Only one way to know for sure. 1003756 1003756 3