SQL - Create XML - How to set Unicode UTF-8

Question

I have a problem with creating an XML file from inside a SQL PROCEDURE. The XMLs get created and placed in the correct folder. Although when I open the file in XMLSpy, it says the following error:

Your file contains 3 character(s) that should not be present in a file using the Unicode UTF-8 encoding... The offending characters are è (0xE8), ü (0xFC), é (0xE9)

When I open the XML file in Notepad++ and check for encoding (via menu Encoding on top), it says it is in ANSI and not in UTF-8.

So my question is: How do I get it to turn into UTF-8? Any suggestions? The code of my procedure can be found below:

@File        VARCHAR(2000) // parameter
AS 

BEGIN 
DECLARE @OLE            INT 
DECLARE @FileID         INT 

EXECUTE sp_OACreate 'Scripting.FileSystemObject', @OLE OUT 

EXECUTE sp_OAMethod @OLE, 'OpenTextFile', @FileID OUT, @File, 8, 1 

DECLARE @Text XML
SET @Text = (SELECT TOP(1) [xml] from VW_WARP_LEVERANCIERS_XML)     

EXECUTE sp_OAMethod @FileID, 'WriteLine', Null, @Text

EXECUTE sp_OADestroy @FileID 
EXECUTE sp_OADestroy @OLE 

END

EDIT 1

Changed my code, exporting to ASCII instead of Unicode (as suggested below by Wolf), but this didn't help too. But here is that part of code:

DECLARE @OLE            INT 
DECLARE @FileID         INT

EXECUTE sp_OACreate 'Scripting.FileSystemObject', @OLE OUT 

EXECUTE sp_OAMethod @OLE, 'CreateTextFile', @FileID  OUT, @File, 2, False

DECLARE @Text XML
SET @Text = (SELECT TOP(1) [xml] from VW_WARP_LEVERANCIERS_XML)     

EXECUTE sp_OAMethod  @FileID , 'Write', Null, @Text
EXECUTE sp_OAMethod  @FileID , 'Close'


EXECUTE sp_OADestroy @FileID 
EXECUTE sp_OADestroy @OLE 

END 

Answer 1

I found a solution via another way. (don't remember which website I found it) See code below. This code will export my file in UTF-8-BOM encoding.

@File        VARCHAR(2000)
AS 

BEGIN 

DECLARE @OLE            INT 

EXECUTE sp_OACreate 'ADODB.Stream',  @OLE OUTPUT

DECLARE @Text XML
SET @Text = (SELECT TOP(1) [xml] from VW_WARP_LEVERANCIERS_XML)     
DECLARE @Converted NVARCHAR(MAX)
SET @Converted = CONVERT(nvarchar(MAX), @Text)

EXECUTE sp_OASetProperty             @OLE,    'Type',             2                           --1 = binary, 2 = text
EXECUTE sp_OASetProperty             @OLE,    'Mode',             3                           --0 = not set, 1 read, 2 write, 3 read/write
EXECUTE sp_OASetProperty             @OLE,    'Charset',          'UTF-8'                     --'ISO-8859-1'
EXECUTE sp_OASetProperty             @OLE,    'LineSeparator',    'adLF'
EXECUTE sp_OAMethod                  @OLE,    'Open'  
EXECUTE sp_OAMethod                  @OLE,    'WriteText',        NULL,       @Converted      --text method

--Commit data and close text stream
EXECUTE sp_OAMethod                  @OLE,    'SaveToFile',       NULL,       @File, 2   --1 = notexist 2 = overwrite
EXECUTE sp_OAMethod                  @OLE,    'Close'
EXECUTE sp_OADestroy                 @OLE

EXECUTE sp_OADestroy @OLE 

END 

Answer 2

Generally, SQL Server does not support UTF-8 by itself. However, I'm not sure about FSO, maybe it does.

The OpenTextFile documentation states that you can determine the file format, ie ASCII or Unicode. Try:

EXECUTE sp_OAMethod @OLE, 'OpenTextFile', @FileID OUT, @File, 8, 0;

This should give you an ASCII file format.