output UTF?

[mikro]

thank you both. Meanwhile i realized, that just the setGenerateByteOrderMark seemed to have worked: there were some bad characters left in my database, so it wasn't my apps fault to export them.
nevertheless i am sure it makes sense to use the setCodec for output. But what about the input? how can i know which format the file is in. As long as it has been generated by my app it's easy, but of course i want to be able to use my importfilter for easily inserting handwritten data as well.
shouldn't Qt automatically convert everything to UTF?

[jacek]

how can i know which format the file is in

Let the user specify it.

shouldn't Qt automatically convert everything to UTF?

Internally Qt does use Unicode, but when you read something you must tell it what encoding to use (otherwise it will assume that input is encoded using QTextCodec::codecForLocale() or try to guess if it isn't UTF-16).