Re: Oracle 10G - character sets.

markpapadakis <markpapadakis_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

'?' means that there is a conversion problem.

What exactly do you mean by 'omegas'?
Do you mean the greek character with UNICODE code point 0x03A9 or 0x03C9 or are you referring to the five-character string 'omega'?

> 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.

There is no EL8ISO8859P, (Greek would be EL8ISO8859P7). Maybe your problem is a typo really.

On the other hand, if you are trying to store greek characters in a database, WE8MSWIN1252 is the wrong database character set for you because there are no greek letters in this codepage (the exception being "mu", used as "micro" sign, which is UNICODE 0x00B5).

Can you be more detailed on the following points:

• What is your operating system and Oracle version?
• What is the system character set when you run
  1. SQL*Plus
  2. PHP
• What is your database character set?
• What was the database character set of the database from which the export files originate?
• What characters cause problems for you?
• What is the exact setting of NLS_LANG when
  1. things look right with SQL*Plus
  2. things look wrong with SQL*Plus
  3. things look wrong with PHP
• What exactly do you get instead of the problem characters when it is NOT a question mark?

Yours,
Laurenz Albe Received on Mon Jan 08 2007 - 04:45:44 CST