I'm working on a C# application that has to read an Access database (.mdb), on Linux. I'm using Mono to compile and run the application.
Suppose I have a test database that I create in Access 2013. It has one table: TestTable, with the default ID column and a testField1 column created with the 'Long Text' type. I insert three rows, with these values for the testField1 column: "foo", "bar", "baz". The database is saved as 'Access 2002-2003 Database (*.mdb)'.
The resulting database (named Test.mdb) is transferred to my Linux box. Just as a sanity check, I can run mdb-export on the database:
$ mdb-export Test.mdb TestTable
ID,testField1
1,"foo"
2,"bar"
3,"baz"
So far, so good. Now, suppose we have a C# program that reads the testField1 column of the table:
using System;
using System.Data.Odbc;
class Program {
public static void Main(string[] args){
try {
OdbcConnection conn = new OdbcConnection("ODBC;Driver=MDBTools;DBQ=/path/to/Test.mdb");
conn.Open();
var command = conn.CreateCommand();
command.CommandText = "SELECT testField1 FROM TestTable";
var reader = command.ExecuteReader();
while(reader.Read()){
Console.WriteLine(reader.GetString(0));
}
} catch(Exception e){
Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
Console.WriteLine(e.StackTrace);
}
}
}
I would expect that running this program would print "foo", "bar", and "baz". However, compiling and running the program does not yield this output:
$ mcs mdb_odbc.cs -r:System.data.dll
$ mono mdb_odbc.exe
潦o
$ # this line added to show the empty lines
My guess is that this is an encoding issue, but I have no idea how to resolve it. Is there a way to fix my program or the environment that it runs in so that the contents of the database are printed correctly? I believe that it is an issue with either ODBC or MDBTools, because in a similar program, a string equality check against fields of a database fails.
I'm using Ubuntu 16.10. mono --version outputs Mono JIT compiler version 5.4.0.167 (tarball Wed Sep 27 18:38:59 EDT 2017) (I built it from source with this patch applied to fix another issue with ODBC). MDBTools, installed through Apt, is version 0.7.1-4build1, and the odbc-mdbtools package is the same version.
I know that the combination of tools and software I'm using is unusual, but unfortunately, I have to use C#, I probably have to use Mono, I have to use an Access database, and I have to use ODBC to access the database. If there's no other way around it, I suppose I could convert the database to another format (SQLite comes to mind).
