Charset problems

Hi all,

I've just made a mess for myself and I'm hoping someone will know how to fix it.

We do database-backed websites. I took a site that was running under 8.7.1.4 and moved it to 9.2.0.4 (both on RedHat Linux) using exp/imp. I didn't specify a character set in either case. The data has accented characters and they have been working fine in 8.1..7.4.

Now, it seems that the default setting of NLS_CHARACTERSET in 8.1.7.4 was US7ASCII and in 9.2.0.4 it's WE8ISO8859P1. Everything I've read about this conversion says that since it's going from 7 bit to 8 bit there shouldn't be any data problems. Well, hah! :) We didn't spot any at first, but now that the client is looking closely he's finding pages all over the place that have ?? where accented characters should be (he was in charge of doing this during the move and he fell down on the job, but it's still me who has to pick up the pieces).

The problem was even worse at first; some characters displayed ok until you edited the page via the web browser, and then they turned into ?? as well. I was able to fix that, as far as I can tell, by setting NLS_CHARACTERSET to WE8ISO8859P1 in the environment of the user running the site, and therefore setting it for the Oracle client. It has not, unfortunately, helped us with the rest of the mess.

The web server (AOLserver) is configured to use iso-8859-1 for it's charset and has been all along. The only thing that has changed here is the Oracle version and it's charset.

Going back and reimporting the data is a last resort, as we'd either lose or recreate user data that has been entered since the site was moved on Sunday night. Is there anything else I can do to fix this?

In short, heeeeeeelp! :)

thanks,

janine

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