Foreign and Unicode characters not supported by QODBC

Information:

QuickBooks allows users to put foreign (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, etc...) characters into item descriptions, etc... Unfortunately, these characters are not appropriately returned in qbXML responses (and, therefore, QODBC responses since they're based on Intuit's qbXML SDK.)

The problem is two-fold. The Intuit code wasn't written to handle Unicode characters at the SDK level, so any characters QuickBooks returns to the SDK level aren't appropriately interpreted. Secondly, the parser used by the SDK runtime in QuickBooks doesn't support some of the character sets for foreign characters, so even if the underlying SDK runtime code handled Unicode characters, the SDK parser wouldn't. That means one cannot pass foreign characters into QuickBooks through the SDK to QODBC.