RE: UTF character set application problem

Marc:

We saw some strangeness when we started investigating Unicode, too.

The first question I have, though, is somewhat non-intuitive. What is the NLS_LANG parameter for the client side, as viewed from the UTF database?

Here's what we learned...if the client and the database are using the same NLS_LANG value, then Oracle presumes the data to be=20 correct and does no checking. We learned this when we found 8-bit extended ASCII characters in a US7ASCII database; how the heck did they get in there? From a client also using US7ASCII as the characterset.

When we changed the client characterset to WE8ISO8859, then we found that Oracle zero'ed the high-order bit and US7ASCII-ized the characters as they were inbound.

You might try setting your client to WE characterset and see if you can get the characters loaded correctly. We haven't tried this ourselves, but it might work.

HTH,
Mike

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

From: mperkowitz_at_comcast.net [mailto:mperkowitz_at_comcast.net] Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 5:58 PM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: UTF character set application problem

We're having a problem with character sets. Recently we switched our database to UTF and now we have problems with names containing accented characters, etc. generating errors when we are trying to insert them =3D into
the database.

The data originates from a database that uses Western European character set. We expected that UTF being a superset, there would be no problems = =3D
with
switching. However, after a lot of testing, we found that UTF is not compatible with WE characters. If the data originates as WE, you must either store it in a UTF database or do an explicit translation to UTF.

This is counter-intuitive to me, but it is my first experience with =3D using
different character sets.

The application is in Java using thin JDBC drivers and no =3D Oracle-specific
functions. We created a very simple test program to prove out this =3D finding.
We've tested this on 9iR1, 9iR2, and 8i and it works the same.

Anyone else encounter this? Is it just my misconceptions on this in the first place? Or have I overlooked something?

Thanks,
Marc Perkowitz.

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Fri Sep 17 2004 - 21:58:46 CDT