inserting non-english strings into oracle table

Hello,

I am doing a project for a Japanese client using Oracle. I need to select and insert Japanese Shift-JIS character-encoded strings into a table column (of type varchar2). the problem is, the insert statement will convert the string previously encoded in Shift-JIS into ASCII. I am

using an English version of Oracle.

My questions are:
1. Do I need to set an NLS option to handle character encoding like Shift-JIS? If so, how do I do that? If you have the exact NLS command, it would be great.

2. If I dont use NLS, is there a function which would allow me to insert

the original hex values of a string? So, my insert statement would look something like, "insert into tablename values ('0xc2 0x83 0x7e')". This would essentially allow me to store my encoded character "as is" into the table.

Thanks in advance. :o) Received on Thu Feb 18 1999 - 00:35:50 CST