Re: character set weirdness and .NET

Greg Shaw wrote:

> I have been searching high and low without success.
> I have an Oracle 7 DB (stop laughing). I am not the DBA. It is
> what I have been given to work with. It's NLS_CHARACTERSET from
> NLS_DATABASEPARAMETERS is AL24UTFFSS. All the text columns
> are VARCHAR2.
> I read the data using OraOleDb.Oracle (the Oracle supplied OleDb
> provider) into a .NET program I have written.
> When I run the program on my development machine the text reads
> and displays properly. I had no idea I had a problem until I go to
> install it on a client machine and they get all text displayed
> as vertical bars. One guy even gets Chinese characters.
> I have built a WinXP environment for testing and it exhibits the
> problem.

I faced a similar problem and found that it could be corrected by setting the nls_lang registry entry on the client machine to match up with the nls_characterset of the database. With both machines using the same characterset, conversions are not an issue.

Of course, if your client machine connects to several different databases this might not work for you. And I'm using Oracle 9.2, so this advice may not be applicable to Oracle 7.

On W2k3/9.2 Client the registry entry is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> ORACLE -> HOME0 -> nls_lang. Not sure about XP/Oracle7.

Good luck.

-- 
//-Walt
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