Re: Accented Characters with US7ASCII

"Keith Jamieson" <Keith.Jamieson_at_phoenix.ie> writes:

> Is it possible to use accented characters with the US7ASCII charcacter set.
> Specifically, I have Oracle 8, US7ASCII, and German, where I need to use
> special german characters.

"kind of"

If your client is set to US7ASCII then Oracle will do no conversion between the client and server. If you store characters with the high bit set using iso-8859-1 (WEIISO in oracle-speak) then they'll be stored as-is on the server and retrieved as-is by your client. So it will "work".

However the server will still consider this data US7ASCII. If another client connects with *any* other character set chosen, even WEIISO then the server will feel compelled to "convert" the US7ASCII to WEIISO by stripping all the high bits.

The server will also sort these characters "incorrectly" as far as standard collation rules for iso-8859-1 etc.

So the question depends on whether you have control over every client you're concerned about. And also whether the set of clients and character sets will change in the future. It will be much harder to manage in the future if you have a convention of storing random binary data in US7ASCII fields and not using the Oracle features to deal with character sets.

-- 
greg