Foreign and Unicode characters not supported by QODBC
Information:
Evidently QuickBooks allows users to put foreign (ie Chinese, Japanese, etc...) characters into item descriptions, etc... Unfortunately, these characters are not returned properly in qbXML responses (and, therefore, QODBC responses since they're based on Intuit's qbXML SDK.)
The problem is two-fold. At the SDK level, the Intuit code wasn't written to handle Unicode characters, so any characters QuickBooks returns to the SDK level aren't interpreted properly. Secondly the parser used by the SDK runtime in QuickBooks doesn't support some of the character sets for foreign characters, so even if the underlying SDK runtime code handled Unicode characters, the SDK parser wouldn't. That means one cannot currently pass foreign characters into QuickBooks through the SDK to QODBC.