Converting SQL Server 2000 data from UCS-2 to UTF-8

Hello,

I am currently working on a JRun 3 application that lets the user input data in a Latin language such as French, English, etc. or in an Eastern or Far-Eastern language such as Arabic, Japanese, etc., into an HTML form whose character set is UTF-8. As soon as the user presses the form's Submit Button, the data get stored in a SQL Server 2000 database located on the Web server. Unfortunately, SQL Server does not support UTF-8 (see http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q232580&). It supports UCS-2 instead. As a result, the non-ASCII data returned by the database and displayed by my JSP scripts are garbage.

Is there a solution to this problem other than writing code to convert the database's UCS-2 characters to UTF-8 characters? If writing conversion code is the only solution, are you aware of any UCS-2-to-UTF-8 Java code available on the Web?

Many thanks.

Philippe de Rochambeau