Re: Oracle 7 -> Oracle 8 + 8th bit problem and NLS_LANG

"Anurag Varma" <avdbi_at_hotmail.com> writes:

> What is the characterset on both databases?
> select * from nls_database_parameters; --- ??

    On Oracle 7, the charset is US7ASCII, and it's ZHT16BIG5 on Oracle 8.

> Also, In the Oracle 7 database what is the datatype
> of the columns you are selecting from ...
> same question for the Oracle 8?

    VARCHAR2.
> I might be wrong .. but don't you think you
> should have tried convert(data,'fromcharset','tocharset')?

    I tried, but get '?' instead of Chinese characters.

    The current situation is this:

• on Oracle 7, the characters are coded in Big5 with US7ASCII as the charset
• if I use the function convert(), the function (or the associated code) does not seems to understand that one Big5 character = two bytes, so it outputs '?' instead as it cannot interpret ...

    Actually, what I need is really simple: transfer raw data from Oracle 7 to Oracle 8 only without stripping the 8th bit, in an Oracle job...

    As this is for use with a web server, the only hack I have found to display the Chinese characters is:

• insert data into column with rawtohex(...), where the 8th bit is preserved; the stored string looks like 'AFABAC...'
• when I need to display it, I read the string and generate a new string according to these values, two chracters (AF, AB, AC, ...) at a time

    Of course, this is ugly, because I have then to double the columns that may contain Chinese and the web pages code have to take care of this... Received on Wed Aug 28 2002 - 05:21:47 CDT