Question

We are currently migrating one of our oracle databases to UTF8 and we have found a few records that are near the 4000 byte varchar limit.
When we try and migrate these record they fail as they contain characters that become multibyte UF8 characters.
What I want to do within PL/SQL is locate these characters to see what they are and then either change them or remove them.

I would like to do :

SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(COLUMN,'[^[:ascii:]],'')

but Oracle does not implement the [:ascii:] character class.

Is there a simple way doing what I want to do?

Answer 1

In a single-byte ASCII-compatible encoding (e.g. Latin-1), ASCII characters are simply bytes in the range 0 to 127. So you can use something like [\x80-\xFF] to detect non-ASCII characters.