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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T03:50:04+00:00

We have a problem with characters outside of the basic ASCII set appearing as

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We have a problem with characters outside of the basic ASCII set appearing as upside down question marks in our Oracle 10g database.

I have the following script to load some test data. The script is saved as Latin-1/ISO-8859-1 on a remote UNIX server from Komodo IDE:

#!/wload/espd/app/perl/bin/perl

use strict; 
use warnings;
use Encode;
use esp_libs_db;
my $dbh = espDbConnectNew();

my $sql = q{ INSERT INTO DBUSER.test VALUES ('qwérty')};

#$sql = encode("iso-8859-1", $sql);

my $rows = $dbh->do($sql)  or Carp::croak "ERROR: PM_DB_0010:[" . $DBI::errstr . "]   Cannot run stmt:\n";;
print $rows;
$dbh->commit();
$dbh->disconnect();



sub espDbConnectNew {
    my ( $database ) = @_;    
    my %connectionStrings = &esp_libs_db::espGetConnectionStrings( $database );

    # Set Environment Variables
    $ENV{ORACLE_SID}=$connectionStrings{"SID"};
    $ENV{ORACLE_HOME}=$connectionStrings{"HOME"};
    my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Oracle:SID=$connectionStrings{'SID'};HOST=$connectionStrings{'HOST'};PORT=$connectionStrings{'PID'}",
    "$connectionStrings{'USER'}","$connectionStrings{'PWD'}",
    {PrintError=>0,
    RaiseError => 0,
    AutoCommit => 0}
) or Carp::croak "ERROR: PM_DB_0003:  Cant connect to db:\n";


    return $dbh;
} #espDbConnect

The database it loads into is an Oracle 10g database with the following parameters:

NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET  AL16UTF16
NLS_LANGUAGE    ENGLISH
NLS_TERRITORY   UNITED KINGDOM
NLS_CHARACTERSET    WE8ISO8859P1

The single column on the test table is of type VARCHAR2(255).

Despite a full working day reading about these problems I don’t really know what to do to solve/diagnose the exact problem.

I’ve tried this both with and without using Encode to encode the SQL string before executing it.

Thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    How are you retrieving the data when you get the upside down question marks? What is the NLS_LANG environment variable on the client where you are retrieving the data?

    In SQL*Plus, can you run

    SELECT dump( column_name, 1013 ), column_name
  FROM DBUSER.test

    and post the results? The DUMP function shows what is actually stored in the database– that will show whether the problem is in storing the accented character or whether the problem is in retrieving the accented character.

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