Reading names with special characters from STEP files

Hi,

I have realized that when I read in STEP files with names, special characters are not read in as expected. For example the German character "ä" becomes "\X2\00E4\X0\". This seems to be somehow encoded. Is there already some mechanism to convert it back to the non-encoded special characters?

I get the names from StepRepr_RepresentationItem like this:

Handle (StepRepr_RepresentationItem) shapeRepresentationItem;
        shapeRepresentationItem = Handle(StepRepr_RepresentationItem)::DownCast(
                shapeEntity);
        const std::string shapeName = shapeRepresentationItem->Name()->ToCString();

Thanks for any help!

Benjamin