decoding / pre/post processing to string columns in MDB2

[mortoray]

I am converting some older PHP code which uses a custom DB class which includes a string method for accessing textual results. I would like to use MDB2, but there appears to be no replacement facility for this.

The remote DB uses utf-8 for encoding, but is MySQL4 and does not support the Names directive (and the tables are mostly incorrectly marked as iso-latin-1). For these reasons I can't simply use the "text" data type and have conversion work correclty.

Is there a way to specify custom conversions for fields of "text" type? Or can somebody point me to how I would create a custom data type and do this conversion on it?