Accessing character set information

[Nope nope]

Looking through the variable inspector I can see that a MySqlDataReader has access to the character set a certain field is (utf8, latin..., it's a property called CharacterSetIndex inside MySqlField) but I don't see any direct way of accessing any of the MySqlFields through the MySqlDataReader, just the converted data.

Is there any way to access the character set that doesn't require reflection? The encoding of the original data is important as it has to be re-encoded to be sent through a network socket and sometimes specific encodings are required for the data to be properly parsed on the other side of the socket.

Thanks in advance.