C# OLEDB driver not reading null character

Question

I am trying to read a dbf file through ADO using the FoxPro OLEDB driver. I can query fine however there are some special characters which do not seem to be coming through. They are not printable characters as disappear when clicked on however are definitely not the same via OLEDB as they are in FoxPro.

For example, the following field through Visual FoxPro:

When this is accessed through OLEDB it displays as the following:

I've narrowed this down to the fact that the first string contains the ASCII code 0 (null) character as the 10th character - this is valid however so I do not wish to remove it, but whatever I try the string ends after 9 characters when reading with ADO.

Answer 1

You don't show us any code and the image links are broken, we are left out with guesses. I have been using VFPOLEDB driver from C# for years and do no have this problem. I believe you are trying to describe a problem that exists on C# side and not VFP side. In VFP even the char(0) is a valid character. In C# however (docs are misleading IMO, says this is not the case but it is) strings are ASCIIZ strings where char(0) is accepted as the end of string. This should be your problem. You could simply read as a byte array instead, casting the field to a blob. Something like:

Instead of plain SQL like this:

select myField from myTable

Do like this and cast:

select cast(myField as w) as myField from myTable

EDIT: Images were not broken but blocked for me by my ISP, go figure why.