I suggest to have a look at the XML document returned from the API, ideally in an XML aware editor / viewer which visualizes the document structure.

HTH
Volker
DB-TecKnowledgy

I think you should use (long) nvarchar data types for the OPEN XML output columns (i.e. in your case the "lat" column). According to the docs, the XML data will then be interpreted as NCHAR data, as well - to cite:

The xml-data is parsed directly in the NCHAR encoding if there are any NCHAR columns in the output. The xpath and namespaces arguments are also converted and parsed in the NCHAR encoding.

I was finally able to solve this... I don't even know the correct word... 'thing'. I don't know where to start, because the error is unclear, and the documentation looks incomplete for Unicode-related questions.

There are important links that explain that SqlAnywhere (when it cannot convert a string from one encoding to another) replaces the multi-byte character with '0x1a'. There is an option (on_charset_conversion_failure) that you can try to switch to Error to see if SA faces some difficulties with an implicit conversion. And I forgot to mention that you cannot use this option, because the default collation is LATIN1251 (at least on my machine) - 'single byte'.

If you execute the SELECT statement in SCJVIEW, you will see that SA returns a different string than you submitted:

SELECT  'Pašića Hadži' AS chr1,   'Жпа' AS chr2,
       N'Pašića Hadži' AS nchr1, N'Жпа' AS nchr2;

Here is what I see on my screen:

But after I have created the DB file with the following command line options:

dbinit -dba dba,sql -mpl 3 -ze utf8 -zn UTF8BIN -z UTF8BIN anotherDB

I was able to get what I really wanted:

Even you code works on a fresh DB file:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION "dba"."CallGoogleApi"( IN "sLocation" LONG NVARCHAR)
RETURNS LONG BINARY
URL '!sLocation'
TYPE 'HTTP:GET'

SELECT * FROM OPENXML("CallGoogleapi"('https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/xml?address=pasica+75000+tuzla&language=de@region=de'), '/GeocodeResponse/result/geometry/location/lat')
              WITH("lat" LONG NVARCHAR'text()')

p.s. don't repeat my faults... don't work with Unicode in SQL. This is painful.

I think the problem is not the OPENXML call but the web client function. It seems to convert the returned value to the CHAR datatype (so it works when you use UTF-8 as CHAR encoding). That restriction is documented here under "data-type", if my assumption is correct:

Only SOAP requests support the transmission of typed data such as FLOAT, INT, and so on. HTTP requests support the transmission of strings only, so you are limited to CHAR types.

So you might have to use a web client function of type SOAP...