I'm programming in VB.NET using Visual Studio 2008. I need to define a string literal containing the character "÷" equivalent to Chr(247). I understand that internally VS uses UTF-16 encoding, but when the source file is written to disk it contains the single byte value F7 for this character.
This source file is processed by another program that uses UTF-8 encoding by default, so it fails to interpret this character correctly, attempting to combine it with the following single-byte character. What encoding would correctly interpret the single byte F7 as the single character ÷?
Alternatively, is there a way of expressing a non-ASCII literal that uses only ASCII characters - like using some kind of escape sequence?