Question

Sorry for this “stupid” Questions but iam not able to find a solution..

I have an Table in my Oracle Database. The “ä,ö,ß” are stored in this Format:

\344
\374

Is there anyway to convert them back? I need an excel sheet..

Answer 1

What you really mean is that the tool you used to get this data renders the characters as \344 \374.

To make sure how they are stored you would actually need to request a dump. As in

alter system dump datafile xx block min y block max z ;

This is the best test. It might well as well be that your chars are stored OK but your tooling settings are wrong. To find out you first need to know the database character set

 select * from V$NLS_PARAMETERS where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET';

And then compare 344 374 with the expected codes. As a matter of fact 344 is the correct octal value for a umlaut with the ISO 8859-1 character set.

Make sure your client NLS_LANG settings (either environment variable or registry setting) is well set (e.g. for windows WE8MSWIN 1252)