Accented characters issue

Hi,

I am having characterset issue when showing data from the database. Upon checking my database settings, the NLS_CHARACTERSET is set as "US7ASCII".

This project that I am currently working on was previously written in PHP. I then had to migrate it into asp.net.

Take note that the german special characters are shown as boxes in the database and were shown correctly in PHP using htmlentities.

I am using the function below to try and convert the data from the database but what I get is "?" as replacement for the accented character:

PublicFunction ToDEUnicode(ByVal str AsString)AsString       

     Dim bytes20127AsByte()       

     Dim bytesAsByte()       

     Dim encoding20127As System.Text.Encoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(20127)     

     Dim enc28591As System.Text.Encoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(28591)

     bytes20127 = encoding20127.GetBytes(str)

     bytes = System.Text.Encoding.Convert(encoding20127, enc28591, bytes20127)

     Dim convertStringAsString

     convertString = enc28591.GetString(bytes)

     Return convertString

EndFunction

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Sample Output:

Waage f?r Magazine

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I had also tried to do a different approach where I had used convert() on the query itself.

Example:

select convert(tool_name, WE8ISO8859P1) tool_name from ...

Output:

Waage f�r Magazine

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I very much appreciate if anyone can help me with this problem.

Thank you very much.