Selecting against values outside the ASCII range!!!

Hi all,

    I currently have to do some CAD software development, which is what I normally do, for a system that is tied back into an Oracle DB, the Oracle part being new to me.

            My situation is that there is a column, call it "col3" in a table that is defined as char(1) but somehow this column has the value 1, 3, 9, 11, 23, 35 and 43 in it. These are NOT the characters '1', '3', '9' etc but the actual values is in the value for 'A' is 65 in the ASCII table. This is causing me angst in that when I attempt to select against this column:

select * from table1 when col3 = 1

for the value 1, I get an error

ORA-01722: invalid number

If I in turn do

select * from table1 when col3 = '+'

where '+' is the ASCII character for value 43, one of the values I have, I get data. Is there a way that I can somehow compare against the values that are in the control area, less than 32, of the ASCII table, ie 1, 3, 9, 11, 23? I've looked at TO_CHR() and TO_NUMBER() but to my inexperienced eye, they don't appear to do what I need.

            Any thoughts greatly appreciated,

                        Andrew Lowe

p.s. I get this when I go through TOAD V7.6 back to Oracle 9i V9.2 Received on Tue Apr 06 2004 - 11:31:41 CEST