Toubles Storing ASCII character greater than 127

Let me start by saying that I am new to Oracle so please excuse my ignorance.

I have this problem whereby when I insert any characters from the the ASCII character set with code >= 127 Oracle seems to change its representation to a '?'--so when I select the data from either sqlplus or my program (perl using DBI) I do not get the same data I stored.

My test table definition is as follows and I have tried this with both nvarchar2 and varchar2 with the same result. create table tester ( tester_id NUMBER(19,0) not null, tester_data varchar2(2000));

Here's my NLS_DATABASE_PARAMETERS table for your benefit:

 PARAMETER VALUE

• ---------------------------- NLS_LANGUAGE AMERICAN NLS_TERRITORY AMERICA NLS_CURRENCY $ NLS_ISO_CURRENCY AMERICA NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS ., NLS_CHARACTERSET AL32UTF8 NLS_CALENDAR GREGORIAN NLS_DATE_FORMAT DD-MON-RR NLS_DATE_LANGUAGE AMERICAN NLS_SORT BINARY NLS_TIME_FORMAT HH.MI.SSXFF AM NLS_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT DD-MON-RR HH.MI.SSXFF AM NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET AL16UTF16 NLS_TIME_TZ_FORMAT HH.MI.SSXFF AM TZR NLS_TIMESTAMP_TZ_FORMAT DD-MON-RR HH.MI.SSXFF AM TZR NLS_DUAL_CURRENCY $ NLS_COMP BINARY NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS BYTE NLS_NCHAR_CONV_EXCP FALSE

George Received on Tue Apr 20 2010 - 12:32:03 CDT