Re: Character confusion

Marcel Stör schrieb:
> My environment is RedHat and 9i. If I enter German umlauts into a table
> through a GUI tool like DBAStudio and retrieve the same values with
> DBAStudio everything seems to be ok. However, if I query the same table from
> console with SQLPlus the umlauts are no umlauts anymore (ü turns to u, ö
> turns to o).
>
> So I checked v$nls_parameters of the session:
> NLS_CHARACTERSET is WE8ISO8859P1
> NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET is AL16UTF8
> with AMERICAN/AMERICA
>
> I just doesn't look right...

Looks ok, WE8ISO8859P1 includes German umlauts, but not the Euro sign. WE8ISO8859P15 includes the Euro sign. AMERICAN/AMERICA influences the sort order, money signs etc., but should not change the umlauts.

>
> So I also checked sys.props$. As expected it returns the same values.
>
> Linux' $LANG environment parameter is de_CH.UTF-8.
>
> I'm stuck with all those locale's and charactersets. I also changed the
> Linux locale to en_US.UTF-8, which - as expected - has no influence on the
> umlaut behaviour. Not surprisingly, a CGI web app running on Oracle returns
> the umlauts like they appear on the console.
>
> I would realy appreciate if you could tell me how to sync all those
> settings.
>
> Best regards,
> Marcel
>
>

German umlauts (and other non-ASCII characters) can be the source of great confusion.

At first, check the character set of your database: select * from nls_database_parameters;

Sometimes the database is created with US7ASCII character set, and your umlauts depends on the mercy of the server and the client tools.

Second, set the NLS_LANG environment variable as described in earlier postings, e.g. export NLS_LANG=GERMAN_GERMANY.WE8ISO8859P1;

Regards!
Rainer

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