How to define a string literal containing non-ASCII characters?

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 th开发者_如何学Cis 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?

well, i always thought that by default VS uses UTF-8 to save files. But ÷ is F7 in encoding ISO 8859-1. If this is not enough for you go here: how to change source file encoding in csharp project (visual studio / msbuild machine)?