Oracle 10G - character sets.

Good day,

I hope someone will be able to help me out with an issue related to character sets and Oracle 10g.

I have no experience with Oracle - but was asked to extract data out of 2 .dmp files by means of setting up a new oracle instance, using IMP to import them and whatever method was best to extract the imported data into text format.

I installed Oracle, used IMP and all worked smoothly. However, I can't extract the data from the imported tables.

Spooling the rows into a text file won't work for the tables contain blobs. I built this PHP 'client' that connects to oracle (via OCI), retrieves the rows and stores them into text files, however that doesn't work because no matter what character set I would use ( via NLS_LANG ) I would get either '?' or 'omegas' presumable because the charset conversion failed. I decided to build a new client ( C++, using the oracle instantclient sdk ) but also ran into the same problem with charsets. (Using OCIEnvNlsCreate() to explicitly specify the charset won't help, either )

The rows are in WE8MSWIN1252 encoding - setting NLS_LANG to GREEK_GREECE.EL8ISO8859P works just fine with sqlplus. However, it doesn't with my clients ( PHP and C ). Using different NLS_LANG combinations seem to make a difference, yet I am still getting charset conversion issues.

Both sqlplus and my clients use the same library (libclntsh.so.10.1), yet sqlplus must be doing something that I miss - something that allows it to display the characters properly.

Thank you in advance for any ideas or tips, Mark Received on Mon Jan 08 2007 - 02:54:25 CST