RE: Replacement of US7ASCII character set in 11g?

    I regret to say that I have seen that before. Your database is US7ASCII but the client that inserted the data was WE8ISO8859P1 or some such. The ? is Oracle doing the best it can with the data. Regrettably without knowing what was suppose to have been entered you'll never figure it out without dumping the numeric code that it is. I believe you might be able to do that with the ASCIISTR function.  

Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA/NA Team Lead
PAREXEL International  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Janine Sisk Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 2:37 PM
To: oracle-l L
Subject: Re: Replacement of US7ASCII character set in 11g?

Thanks to everyone who replied....

I ran CSSCAN on the original 8.1.7 database and, of course, ran into trouble right away. The conversion from US7ASCII to WE8MSWIN1252 is lossy in a number of places. This does not surprise me terribly; Jared mentioned that you can put "invalid" data into a database of type US7ASCII and I'm pretty sure that all of the programmers who have worked on this site over the years have just assumed that if the database didn't choke on it, then it was ok.

What concerns me is that CSSCAN reports that converting to UTF8 will have the exact same lossy conversions. The two error files are literally identical except for the value of TOCHAR. I thought that UTF8 was the mother of all character sets, so where do I go from here?

As an example, one of the first errors reported looks like this when I do a SELECT in sqlplus:

Lic. en medios de comunicaciÃ?3n

I will be digging further into this, with The Google and all, but if anyone has any light to shed, please do!

janine

On Jan 7, 2010, at 3:07 PM, David Mann wrote:

        When I had clients worried about character set conversions I usually ran Character Set Scanner utility CSSCAN on a copy of the database to check for differences. Here is the reference in the 10g documentation, assuming it is still available in 11g but don't have a link handy.                  

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14225/ch12scann er.htm         

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	Dave Mann
	www.brainio.us
	www.ba6.us - Database Stuff - http://www.ba6.us/rss.xml
	

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