title: Foreign characters show up as ????? in VBA 2003, how to set up UTF-8?
body: <p>I have a Database in Access 2003 that needs to work with foreign language characters. The characters show up fine in the table.  However, when VBA tries to read them it cannot do it.  </p>
  
  <p>As an example, the column ANSWER_TEXT from cf_Answer displays: 佛吉尼亞海灘</p>
  
  <p>But a select statement in VBA:</p>
  
  <pre><code>sqlstmt = "SELECT ANSWER_TEXT AS ans_text FROM cf_Answer"
  Set rst_a = dbs.OpenRecordset(sqlstmt, dbOpenSnapshot)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><code>rst_a![ans_text]</code> returns <code>??????</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I know this has something to do with UTF-8 encoding but I cannot find a way to set it. Is there a way to set it in the table? Currently, ANSWER_TEXT is of datatype <code>memo</code>. Or perhaps there is a way to set VBA to understand those characters?</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone at least point me in the right direction?</p>