RE: Funny oracle character...

My guess: the person who designed the webpage typed in the text in a word process on the Macintosh, which changed the regular "minus sign" to a "fancy hyphen", which appears as a different character on a machine running Windows OS. At the Oracle Magazine link

http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/02-nov/o62sql_online.html <http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/02-nov/o62sql_online.html>

When I view it at work, I see the uppercase Eth (a D with a line through it, an icelandic character) which would be an ascii 208. I suspect that if I viewed the same page on a machine running MacOS I would see a "-": on the Macintosh, an ascii 208 is a hyphen.

This is why, when creating an HTML document, it's important to correctly handle extended ascii characters by using HTML codes.

See ascii 208 on Macintosh here:

http://www.evergreen.edu/biophysics/technotes/program/ascii_ext-mac.htm <http://www.evergreen.edu/biophysics/technotes/program/ascii_ext-mac.htm>

See ascii 208 on Windows here:

http://www.evergreen.edu/biophysics/technotes/program/ascii_ext-pc.htm <http://www.evergreen.edu/biophysics/technotes/program/ascii_ext-pc.htm>

-----Original Message-----

Ruth Gramolini

One of my developers asked me to find out what the strange symbol I have put in bold in this line is:days_in_2000 := begin_2001 Ð begin_2000;

He had seen it several times in the documentation. I can't reproduce it to do a search.

Anyone know about this?

-----Original Message-----

From: Stephen Peterson [mailto:speterson_at_tax.state.vt.us]

http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/02-nov/o62sql_online.html

Using Intervals

Intervals can be used for many things, but in this article I'm going to focus on datetime arithmetic. If you think about it, intervals are really nothing new. Consider the following code, which computes the difference between two dates in order to come up with the number of days in the year 2000:

DECLARE
   begin_2000 DATE := TO_DATE('1-Jan-2000','dd-Mon-yyyy');    begin_2001 DATE := TO_DATE('1-Jan-2001','dd-Mon-yyyy');    days_in_2000 NUMBER;
BEGIN
   days_in_2000 := begin_2001 Ð begin_2000; END;
/

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l