Character set blues...

Environment: Oracle 9i / Solaris 8 / Oracle http server with mod_plsql

Can someone enlighten me please as to what is going on in the scenario below?

We are being sent an XML document via an HTTP post - the XML doc content is sent as the "value" for the field "xml_doc".

The POST is being sent via the Oracle http server into mod_plsql and then into a procedure defined thus:

procedure job

        (xml_doc in clob default null)
is
...
...

All is OK so far. Problem is that in the XML doc there are sometimes some accented characters such as "oriënterend" (hope that came out!).

Whe we look into the CLOB we don't see these - instead we see e.g. "ori?nterend". So it appears that there is some character set translation being performed *before* we get to see the data.... any ideas why this might be?

What further confuses things is that from within our web app (same technology) I can type "oriënterend" into a field and it is saved and redisplayed in the correct format.

So I am mightily puzzled. Any clues as to what might be going on and how to work around it?

-- 

jeremy