Re: Special Characters Created on a UNIX system with HP Terminal on US7ASCII

From: Frank van Bortel <frank.van.bortel_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:06:40 +0200
Message-ID: <f7nulo$e78$2@news5.zwoll1.ov.home.nl>

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Martin T. wrote:
> Frank van Bortel wrote:

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>> Martin T. wrote:
>>> >From the "Globalization Support Guide":
>>> US7ASCII / U.S. 7-bit ASCII / US / Bits: 7 / ASCII
>>>
>>> So you are telling us that you used US7ASCII to store German umlauts?
>>> This is just wrong. US7ASCII is just 0x00 -> 0x7F but the characters
>>> you are talking about are 0x80 -> 0xFF and so cannot be correctly
>>> stored in an US7ASCII character set column.
>>>
>>
>> Simply not true - Oracle *always* stores bytes. Very dangerous
>> assumption, that has cost a lot of money already.
>>
>> Same with the ability to "store the Euro-character in
>> WE8ISO8859P1" - it works with no problem at all.
>>
>> Basically, because you do not store the euro symbol,
>> but a code. It is up to the client to display this code
>> correctly as '€'. If the client is thinking the code
>> belongs to '¢' - it will display that.
>> If the client does not know how to display, the convention is
>> to display an inverted question mark.
>>

>
> I am sorry, I did not want to imply that Oracle actually stores 7bits.
> I oc assumed that there are simply stored byte values since the
> characters are there inside the DB with the correct byte code.
>
> Still it is the wrong character set. It's like telling oracle the the
> charset is UTF8 and then inserting WE8ISO8859P1 -- it *should* work if
> you lie to Oracle about the NLS_LANG character sets, but it's still
> wrong and will get you (it got me) into trouble.
>
> cheers,
> Martin

What would the right thing be then? DB char set = server NLS settings = client NLS settings? Just as dangerous and wrong.

• -- Regards, Frank van Bortel

Top-posting is one way to shut me up...
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