UTF sorting and blank fields, and UTF-8

[Dave Addey]

Hi all,

I¹m a long-time V4RB 1.9, finally making the switch to V4RB 2.0.5.  So, I
have a few questions :-)

Firstly, is there a way I can get my SELECT statements to order with blank
fields appearing *after* all other fields?  For example, if I do "SELECT *
from songstable order by album", I want everything with a non-blank VarChar
in the 'album' table to come first in UTF sorted order, followed finally by
all records with blank album fields.

It seems that by default, blank fields come *first* when I sort in ascending
order.

A second question - my application reads the iTunes XML file, which is in
UTF-8 format.  What is the best way for me to write this to a V4RB database,
and read it from a database, to avoid the REALbasic UTF-8 strings being
converted to another encoding at any point?  I want to keep it as quick as
possible :-)

I'm using REALbasic 5.5.5, V4RB 2.0.5, compiling for Mach-O only, local
database only (no server).  All of my existing code uses the Valentina
class-based approach.

Thanks for any help,

Dave.