Can't insert ñ character to an Oracle database - oracle

Question

I've got an issue inserting ñ chatacter to an Oracle database.
The INSERT operation completes successfully.
However, when I SELECT, I get n instead of ñ.
Also, I noticed executing:
select 'ñ' from dual;
gives me 'n'.
select * from nls_database_parameters where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET';
gives me 'EE8MSWIN1250'.
How do I insert ñ?
I'd like to avoid modifying db settings.
The only way I got this working was:
read the input .csv file with its windows-1250 encoding
change encoding to unicode
change strings to unicode codes representation (in which ñ is \00d1)
execute INSERT/UPDATE passing the value from #3 to a UNISTR function
For sure there is an easier way to achieve this.

Answer 1

Simplest way would be, find out the ASCII of the character using ASCII() and insert use CHR() to convert back to string.
SQL:
select ascii('ñ'),chr(50097) from dual;
Output:
ASCII('Ñ') CHR(50097)
---------- ----------
50097 ñ
The client you are using to connect to database matters. Some clients, donot support these characters.

Answer 2

Before you start your SQL*Plus you have to set the codepage (using chcp command) and NLS_LANG environment parameter accordingly:
chcp 1250
set NLS_LANG=.EE8MSWIN1250
sqlplus ...
However as already given in comments, Windows 1250 does not support character ñ. So, these values will not work.
It is not compulsory to set these values equal to your database character set, however codepage and NLS_LANG must match, i.e. following ones should work as well (as they all support ñ)
chcp 1252
set NLS_LANG=.WE8MSWIN1252
sqlplus ...
or
chcp 850
set NLS_LANG=.WE8PC850
sqlplus ...
Again, EE8MSWIN1250 does not support character ñ, unless data type of your column is NVARCHAR2 (resp. NCLOB) it is not possible to store ñ in the database.

Answer 3

Is that character supported by the database character set?
I could not find that character here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1250
I had no problems inserting that character in my database which has character set WE8MSWIN1252.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252