Seeing non-ASCII character data from SQL Plus

[Michael Scott]

Hi

I've got an Oracle 9.2.0 database setup with UTF8 as the database
character set. I've managed to get some japanese character data into
one of our tables which uses an nvarchar2 column datatype; I've also
managed to create a table whose name includes japanese characters.
This I've done using a custom-built C++ application which has been
specifically built to handle Unicode character data and uses the OCI
in Unicode-mode. What I want to be able to do is see this
extended-character set data via another tool.

So, my question is: how do I configure either SQL plus or SQL Plus
worksheet to see this character data correctly formatted? Enterprise
manager will show me the japanese table name correctly, but what about
seeing the japanese characters from a select statement via SQL plus?
All I get at present is junk data when I select from the table
containing the japanese text data. Are these tools (and TOAD is no
better) fundamentally not capable of displaying multi-byte character
sets? Is there a better tool for this kind of thing?

Thanks
Michael

[Jusung Yang]

It usually takes some playing around. I used to be able to view CKJ
(Chinese, Korean, Japanese) characters with SQL*Worksheet and a with a
third party tool called NJStar running in the back ground. With
iSQL*Plus, it seems to be easier. All you need to do is set the
browser encoding correctly to view the characters, provided the data
has been loaded into the database correctly of course.

- Jusung Yang

michae...@kalido.com (Michael Scott) wrote in message news:<7ef33999.02102...@posting.google.com>...

[Anurag Varma]

Michael,

Apart from the suggestions by other poster ....

Don't know if this would work for you .. but try this:
Download putty:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
set translation (in connection properties) to UTF8.
then set NLS_LANG to UTF8 ...
and then try viewing the data using sqlplus .. normal select .. etc.

Of course there are other telnet clients you could download .. putty
just came to my mind, because I use it often.
If you are already using a UTF8 db charset ... why would you not put
the data in just varchar2?

hope this helps ..

Anurag

"Michael Scott" <michae...@kalido.com> wrote in message news:7ef33999.02102...@posting.google.com...

[Sybrand Bakker]

michae...@kalido.com (Michael Scott) wrote in message news:<7ef33999.02102...@posting.google.com>...

Basically 3 things are needed
1 Your NLS_LANG set appropiately
2 Your current Windows code page should be capable of displaying the
characters
3 You should add a new key
sqlplus_font
to the registry.
The value of this variable is just any character set name known to
display the characters.

Hth

Sybrand Bakker
Senior Oracle DBA

[Michael Scott]

"Anurag Varma" <av...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<urs8imp...@corp.supernews.com>...

Thanks for both previous posts, iSQLplus does the job perfectly. No
matter how I configured my NLS_LANG and ORA_NLS33 variables on my
machine and database (WinXP which is also acting as the database
server) I could not make SQL plus/SQL plus worksheet or TOAD display
the extended characters that were present in my UTF-8 encoded Oracle
instance.

As an aside - we use nvarchar2 in our unicode databases to give us the
flexibility to store text data in UTF-16 (AL16UTF16 national character
set in oracle speak) as well as just UTF8, if so desired by end users
when installing our product on top of on Oracle database. Storage vs
speed tradeoff for unicode text data.

Regards
Michael