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

From: Laurenz Albe <invite_at_spam.to.invalid>
Date: 26 Jul 2007 08:05:24 GMT
Message-ID: <1185437121.426469@proxy.dienste.wien.at>

codadilupo <codadilupo_at_operamail.com> wrote:

>> The right thing would be to do an ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET to
>> change the database to the encoding of the data that are stored in it.

>
> Yes, but going straight this way "gk24" would lose all its special
> characters. How can he keep the "wrong" characters? The only solution
> that I see is to dump out the data in a textfile (using sqlplus or
> another tool) and reinserting them after the charset change.

No.

ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET does not change the contents of the database. It only changes the database character set, which tells Oracle how to interpret the bytes stored in textual columns and stored procedure sources.

A byte 0x80 stored in the database will remain 0x80, but if you change the database character set from US7ASCII to WE8MSWIN1252, it will change its meaning from garbage to a Euro sign.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe Received on Thu Jul 26 2007 - 03:05:24 CDT