I am working with an Oracle 12.2 database. The database characterset is WE8MSWIN1252 (ie. an ASCII characterset).
The database contains a table with a CLOB column (according to Oracle SQL Developer). Some values in this column contain non-ASCII characters (I know this as when using ASCIISTR function on this column I can see the escaped non-ASCII character codes).
How is this possible? I thought ASCII characterset databases could only store unicode in NVARCHAR, NCLOB etc.
(I only discovered this when I was using a linked server to the Oracle db from SQL Server - when I ran an OPENQUERY on the table with the CLOB, it returned ? for the non-ASCII characters. I changed the OPENQUERY query string to use TO_NCLOB(clob_column) and it returned the non-ASCII characters.)
Any ideas?
Thanks
From wikipedia WE8MSWIN1252 description:
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 (code page 1252) is a single-byte character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows for English and many European languages including Spanish, French, and German.
So, it a CLOB in a database with this charset can store strings like éàè. And ASCIISTR returns escaped codes because these chars are not defined in ASCII, for example:
SQL> select asciistr('é') eaccent, asciistr('e') e from dual;
EACCENT E
---------- -
\FFFD\FFFD e
we are using Oracle 19c
there are setting in nls_database_parameters
nls_nchar_characterset is UTF8
nls_charchterset is WE8ISO8859P15
I have a table with one column of varchar2 and another column of nvarchar2
I try to insert in both column the same letter,non english ,for example ş and it is not wotking but if I try another non english letter in my language like ž then is is working in both columns. Another colleagues of mine can not insert any letter correctly using the same database user. I don't understand this behavior,what defines what you can insert as national character?
we receive a big list of different cities in different languages. What is the best way to insert all of them correctly?
I have some issues related to special characters in some tables. For example, some words with character ü were inserted in database as NŒ. Is there a way to find this unicode problems and convert it in a table?
I also checked NLS_CHARACTERSET and LS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET v$nls_parameters table and it looks fine (AL32UTF8 and UTF8).
I have oracle database that I can use to store/display chinese characters.
But when I am using sqlplus to query the database (e.g. running script from sqlplus) the chinese character can't be displayed (all question marks). My purpose is eventually to export the data to CSV files (that contains chinese characters). Any comment on how I can do it?
I have to change the character set from AL32UTF8 to WE8MSWIN1252 in a Oracle 11g r2 Express instance... I tried to use the command:
ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET WE8MSWIN1252;
But it fails saying that MSWIN1252 isn't a superset of AL32UTF8. Then I found some articles talking about CSSCAN, and that tool doesn't seem to be available in Oracle 11 Express.
http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/10g/CharacterSetMigration.php
Anyone has an idea on how to do that? Thanks in advance
Edit
Clarifying a little bit: The real issue is that I'm trying to import data into a table that has a column defined as VARCHAR(6 byte). The string causing the issue is 'eq.mês', it needs 6 bytes in MSWIN1252 and 7 bytes in UT8
You can't.
The Express Edition of 11g is only available using a UTF-8 character set. If you want to go back to the express edition of 10g, there was a Western European version that used the Windows-1252 character set. Unlike with the other editions, Oracle doesn't support the full range of character sets in the Express Edition nor does it support changing the character set of an existing XE database.
Why do you believe you need to change the database character set? Other than potentially taking a bit more storage space to support the characters in the upper half of the Windows-1252 range, which generally aren't particularly heavily used, there aren't many downsides to a UTF-8 database.
I would say that your best option when you want to go to a character set that supports only a subset of the original characters, that your best option is to use exp and imp back (or expdp and impdp).
Are you sure that no single table will contain any character not found in the 1252 code page ?
The problem of only execute that ALTER DATABASE command is that the Data Dictionary was not converted and it can be corrupted.
I had the same problem. In my case, we are using a Oracle 11g Express Edition (11.2.0.2.0) and we really need that it runs on WE8MSWIN1252 character set, but I cannot change the character set on installation (it always install with AL32UTF8).
With a Oracle Client 11g installed as Administrator and run only the csscan full=y (check this link https://oracle-base.com/articles/10g/character-set-migration) and we notice that are lossy and convertible data problems in our database. But, the problems are with the MDSYS (Oracle Spatial) and APEX_040000 (Oracle Application Express) schemas. So, as we dont need this products, we remove them (check this link: http://fast-dba.blogspot.com.br/2014/04/how-to-remove-unwanted-components-from.html).
Then, we export with expdp the users schemas and drop the users (they must be recreated at the end of the process).
Executing csscan again with full=y capture=y, it reports that: The data dictionary can be safely migrated using the CSALTER script. If the report doesnt have this, the csalter.plb script will not work, because there are some conditions that will not be satisfied:
changeless for all CHAR VARCHAR2, and LONG data (Data Dictionary and Application Data)
changeless for all Application Data CLOB
changeless and/or convertible for all Data Dictionary CLOB
In our case, this conditions were satisfied and we could ran the CSALTER script successfully. Moreover, this script executes the ALTER DATABASE command you are trying to run and it converts the CLOB data of Data Dictionary that is convertible.
Finally, we create the users and the tablespaces of our application and we import the dump of the user data successfully.