UTF-8 to ASCII 7 conversion?

Hi all,

We've got an Oracle database in UTF-8 and we build records that travel either in files Unix-to-Unix/Mac/PC or in Oracle to Oracle communication.

Oracle stores the data in multi-octet UTF-8 format so our Unix files end up with multi-octet representations when someone has entered a non ASCII 7 character say an accented character or an NO BREAK SPACE. So, the recipients of the files get errors in record length, column postions, and uninterpretable characters.

In our Oracle to Oracle interfaces we can use a function that looks like this

    convert(swstatus,'WE8ISO8859P1','UTF8') which converts between our UTF-8 coding and a recipient's 2-octet ISO885 coding.

Which brings to mind that ASCII 7 might just be considered another coding scheme

I can write a perl conversion function that would for instance turn an umlaut-o to a plain-old-lowercase-o after the fact in a Unix file but is there a better way?

Question:
Is there a way to use the convert function to convert UTF-8 to a "safe" ASCII 7? -ed Received on Wed Oct 30 2002 - 18:05:06 CST