Re: Have LONG, need CLOB, want answer!

From: Thomas Kyte <tkyte_at_us.oracle.com>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 18:36:30 GMT
Message-ID: <37d11cc9.27948367@newshost.us.oracle.com>

A copy of this was sent to shmurphy_at_my-deja.com (if that email address didn't require changing) On Tue, 31 Aug 1999 14:10:46 GMT, you wrote:

>In trying to stuff rich text format into a LONG
>field in Oracle, I'm stuck with special characters
>such as bullets being returned as question marks.
>I'm needing to retain my MS drivers for Oracle so
>I can't use Oracle's CLOB datatype. It there any
>way of forcing Oracle to retain special characters
>without an aba-cadabra change?
>
>
>Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
>Share what you know. Learn what you don't.

This is undoubtably a nls conversion issue. You say "MS drivers" that implies windows. It uses an 8bit character set (NLS_LANG setting) by default. Is the dtabase on Unix? If so, it might have been created with us7ascii -- a 7 bit character set (thats why the bits are missing on the way back out).

can you tell us

• what is the character set on the client (NLS_LANG)
• what is it on the server:

tkyte_at_8i> select * from v$nls_parameters where parameter = 'NLS_CHARACTERSET';

PARAMETER

---

VALUE

---

NLS_CHARACTERSET
US7ASCII if this is the issue, you would be wanting to use a LONG RAW -- not a LONG -- to do your work with as LONGs are text and subject to nls conversions and LONG RAWS are binary (no conversion).

--
See http://govt.us.oracle.com/~tkyte/ for my columns 'Digging-in to Oracle8i'... Current article is "Part I of V, Autonomous Transactions" updated June 21'st  

Thomas Kyte                   tkyte_at_us.oracle.com
Oracle Service Industries     Reston, VA   USA

Opinions are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Oracle Corporation Received on Tue Aug 31 1999 - 13:36:30 CDT