"Peter Otten" <__peter__ at web.de> wrote in message news:bkumfg$ifj$01$1 at news.t-online.com... > You have to know the encoding of the original file. Why? It's of type 'str' and I would expect that I could write it to DB and get the same 'str' back. That's all I want. Why is it required do know the encoding? Achim