Oracle9i (9.2) and the ASCIISTR('...') Function

Hello!

Is it me, or is this function - ASCIISTR('string') actually completely useless?

The spec tells me:
[q]

ASCIISTR takes as its argument a string in any character set and returns an ASCII string in the database character set. The value returned contains only characters that appear in SQL, plus the forward slash (/). Non-ASCII characters are converted to their Unicode (UTF-16) binary code value.

Example:
SELECT ASCIISTR('ABÄCDE') FROM DUAL;

... so far, so good - this would therefore be a good thing to extract Unicode characters, when my Client cannot get non-ASCII Unicode characters because of some implicit conversion problems with OO4O. But(!) if the string in the Database contains a Backslash, it IS NOT escaped ... so the String "\00c4" does look exactly the same a a string containing the Unicode Character 00c4.
I would call that seriously broken.

mfG, Martin Received on Thu Feb 03 2005 - 03:23:57 CST