Re: What is codepoint of character set?

From: DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org>
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 13:13:10 -0800
Message-ID: <1134681183.246418@jetspin.drizzle.com>

Laurenz Albe wrote:
> nirav <shivam71_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>

>>I can not understand meaning of a sentance, present in Oracle concepts
>>manual..In the chapter of Native Datatypes, it says:
>>
>>The length semantics of character datatypes can be measured in bytes or
>>characters.

>
>
> Translation:
> There are two meanings to 'CHAR(5)': either it means 'a character string
> consisting of 5 bytes' (that is called 'byte semantics') or
> 'a character string consisting of 5 characters' (this is called
> 'character semantics').
>
>

>>Character semantics treat strings as a sequence of characters. "A
>>character is technically a codepoint of the database character set."
>>
>>Here the last sentence : "A character is technically a codepoint of the
>>database character set."  is not clear to me..can u pl. explain what is
>>the meaning of codepoint of db char. set?

>
>
> Translation:
> A character is, technically speaking, an entry in the list of all possible
> characters. This list is called character set (or codepage).
>
> Yours,
> Laurenz Albe

You might also want to build the following table and test it:

CREATE TABLE tnorm (
somecol VARCHAR2(20));

CREATE TABLE tbyte (
somecol VARCHAR2(20 BYTE));

CREATE TABLE tchar (
somecol VARCHAR2(20 CHAR));

desc tnorm
desc tbyte
desc tchar

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)

Received on Thu Dec 15 2005 - 15:13:10 CST