Question

Oracle 11g. PL/SQL. Oracle uses AL32UTF8.

LastName
--------
Manaña

The unicode value in Oracle for the ñ is (00F1) the ascii value is (0241). When I send this value in an email. The email reads ‘manan?a’.
The email value in HEX is (3F).

Question: How can I keep my ‘ñ’ when I send it via email?

Here’s select dump:

  select dump(last_name) => [Typ=1 Len=7: 77,97,110,97,195,177,97]

When I send the email, I call package.mail
Here’s that snippet

 last_name := 'Manaña'
 packagename.mail(recipient ==>'[e-mail]',
                    subject ==>'Email Subject',
                    message ==>last_name);

PROCEDURE mail(sender     IN VARCHAR2 default '[e-mail]',
   recipients IN VARCHAR2,
   subject    IN VARCHAR2,
   message    IN VARCHAR2) IS
   conn utl_smtp.connection;
   userid varchar2(256);
    globalname varchar2(256);
  BEGIN    
    conn := begin_mail(sender, recipients, subject);
    select global_name into globalname from global_name;
    select user into userid from dual;
    write_text(conn, message);
    end_mail(conn);
   END;

Here’s the snippet for package.write_text

    PROCEDURE write_text(conn    IN OUT NOCOPY utl_smtp.connection,
                         message IN VARCHAR2) IS
    BEGIN  
     utl_smtp.write_data(conn, message);
    END;

Answer 1

Mail is fundamentally 7-bit. To send anything else than 7-bit text/plain, encapsulate and encode it using MIME. In your case, it’s probably sufficient to delclare Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" and Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable. Then if course you need to QP-encode your text; your language probably has a library for this. (It’s not hard to roll your own, but it’s usually a bad idea.)