Re: special; characters

Raymond van Daelen <daelen_at_wxs.nl> wrote:
: I have a simple question:
: How to use special characters as ü, â, é, etcetera, in data to be
: stored in an Oracle database.

Short answer:

There are two character sets involved, the server's and the client's. Everything works fine if:

(1) The database has been created with the proper character set

    WE8ISO8859P1. The character set cannot be changed later.

(2) The character set used by the client is also set to WE8ISO8859P1;

    for example, when using SQL*Plus in a Unix environment, set     NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1 . If the client's and the server's character set are identical (no matter what), no character conversion is done. In this way you may smuggle accented characters into a database created with the US7ASCII character set. This works in principle, but you will probably encounter problems later (e.g. when exporting tables).

Long answer:

To be found in the chapter "National Language Support" in the Oracle Server Reference Manual .

   Peter Marksteiner

-- 
Vienna University Computer Center