On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 05:42:56PM -0400, Dossy Shiobara wrote: > On 2005.07.19, Janine Sisk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Now, it seems that the default setting of NLS_CHARACTERSET in 8.1.7.4 > > was US7ASCII and in 9.2.0.4 it's WE8ISO8859P1. Everything I've read > > about this conversion says that since it's going from 7 bit to 8 bit > > there shouldn't be any data problems. Well, hah! :) We didn't spot
Only true if the "7 bit" data you already had in the 8i instance really was 7 bit clean. Obviously yours was not. You've probably also made things doubly hard on yourself by blindly moving the data into that 9i instance. > If you had accented characters (octets with the 8th bit set to 1) stored > in the database under 8.1.7.4, then there is NO way the character set of > the database was US7ASCII. If it was, then when the data was stored it > would have been transcoded to ?'s. Wrong. It is entirely possible, maybe even common. If the Oracle client (e.g., AOLserver) and Oracle server both CLAIM to be using the same character set, then Oracle will stick the text into the RDBMS binary verbatim with no character set conversion at all. I'm not sure how to check but I bet that's what you were doing with the old 8i instance. Of course, if the RDBMS is using US7ASCII, that's guaranteed to corrupt any and all non-ASCII data you insert. But often, if you read the data back out using the exact same client and server setup, the exact inverse corruption will occur and you will get the original data back. This is probably the only reason why your content appeared to be ok on the old database... Janine, I don't know the solution to your problem, but there is some relevent info here: http://www.piskorski.com/docs/oracle.html#db_convert I thought there was an old ArsDigita Systems Journal article on fixing exactly this problem, but I can't seem to find it now, so perhaps I'm mis-remembering. These two articles do have some relevent info on character encodings and Oracle, but they are not the article I was thinking of: http://www.eveandersson.com/arsdigita/asj/multilingual/encoding http://dqd.com/~mayoff/encoding-doc.html -- Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.piskorski.com/ -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
