Re: spooling text with nonprintable ASCII characters

Hi,

    As the saying goes an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure (hey, it's after 1:00 am local time and I feel philosophical). Using a good programming editor you can easily create a procedure with 22 lines, each of which deletes one character and run it against your database -- not the output spool files, but the database.

    The real issue is determining how the special characters got into the database in the first place and correcting whatever is storing the bad data since you appear to be suffering from the classic Garbage In - Garbage Out problem.

regards
Jerry Gitomer

soslav_at_aol.com wrote in message <7likth$e6k$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com>...
>Help!
>
>I currently spool all the data from our production Oracle instance into
>ascii text files. The problem I am having is that I am not able to
>"trim" all the non-printable ASCii characters (all characters less then
>Chr(23)) from the data. These characters are found to the right of
>strings, in the middle of some strings. I have tried the replace
>function but this only allows me to replace one CHR(n) character at a
>time. Is there some function in Oracle that will allow me to "replace"
>these characters from a string? Or do I need to write a stored
>procedure that finds and replaces these non-printable characters? Any
>help would be more than appreciated.
>
>current use of replace in the cursor is as follows:
>
>v_name := REPLACE(v_name, 'CHR(10)', '')
>
>
>
>Thanks,
>Sean
>
>
>Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
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Received on Sun Jul 04 1999 - 00:30:08 CDT