Re: Charset problems

On Jul 19, 2005, at 1:42 PM, David Wendelken wrote:

> I suspect you are hosed and will have to re-load.

I think you are right.

> The accented characters might only appear in a very limited set of
> fields.
> If so, you might be able to extract the key info plus the affected
> columns
> and update in place where the record hasn't been changed since you did
> the
> change-over. Exception reports could tell you which records need to be
> looked at manually.

They are all over the place; the problem is similar to the "fancy apostrophe" issue with Word text, if you are familiar with that. Many pieces of content are full of such markup text, which is broken along with the accented characters.

However, I could possibly do this, if future data would be ok. One thing I forgot to mention is that I cannot change the charset of the database, because there is another site already using it quite happily as-is and I don't want to cause that programmer heartburn.

> However, I don't know what happens when you change the character set
> of a
> database that is up and running.

Oracle's documentation implies that it does (though you do need to restart), but I have a feeling that even if I could do that, the data that's busted now would stay that way.

janine

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