Cannot Store Chinese Characters In Oracle 9.2.0.7 Database

Question

Hi,
I'm having trouble localizing my Oracle 9.2.0.7 / ASP web application for our Chinese-speaking users.
My Oracle 9.2.0.7 Database has NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET set to AL16UTF16.
I've set up a test table thus:
CREATE TABLE "TBL_TEST_CH"
field1                          NVARCHAR2(40),
field2                          NVARCHAR2(40)
I have the Chinese character set installed on my database / web server (same box), as well as a test client machine. I can see Chinese characters in my web browser, and can enter them in a test ASP page I've set up. When I execute an insert statement via ADO, the insert statement seems to work, but the result is that the data seems to be stored as upside-down question marks.
I thought perhaps the data was being somehow scrambled between the web app and the database, so I set up an external table import the Chinese data from a Unicode text file:
CREATE TABLE kenny.ch_import
     FIELD1          NVARCHAR2(255),
     FIELD2          NVARCHAR2(255)
     ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL (TYPE oracle_loader
     DEFAULT DIRECTORY ext_dat_dir
     ACCESS PARAMETERS
     (RECORDS DELIMITED BY ":"
     FIELDS TERMINATED BY "~"
     missing field values are null)
     LOCATION (ext_dat_dir:'test_ch.txt'))
     reject limit unlimited
However, when I query the data in the external table using my web application, it comes back with garbage like "ÿþ1" and the like.
To attempt to determine if the database is capable of storing the Chinese characters, I've performed the following test:
1) I insert a Chinese character in an NVARCHAR2 field in my table by using the UNISTR function thus:
insert into tbl_test_ch (field1) values (unistr('\3E00'))
2) I interrogated the value using the dump function thus:
select dump(field1, 1016) FROM tbl_test_ch
I'm struggling to understand the output. Obviously the character set being used is "AL16UTF16" (which I would expect to be able to store Chinese characters), but the return_format argument I've provided to the function (1016) should return the hexadecimal code point of the character that's being stored. I would expect this to be the same as I inserted ("3E00"), but I'm getting the following output:
DUMP(FIELD1,1016)
Typ=1 Len=2 CharacterSet=AL16UTF16: 3e,0
I'd really appreciate any suggestions on what I could do next to determine exactly where the problem lies. I've not been able to convince myself that the database is correctly storing the Chinese character data, but I appreciate equally that the problem could lie elsewhere.
Thanks in advance,
Kenny McEwan.

Answer 1

Thanks, Serguisz.
My technology stack is as follows:
ASP 3.0 web application, running on IIS6.
On the web servier, I have MDAC 2.8 SP2 on Windows Server 2003 SP1.
On the Oracle database server, I have Windows Server 2003 SP1.
My Oracle database version is 9.2.0.7.
The client I've been using in this investigation is Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.
It does look like you're right about characters coming from the application are being corrupted. To support this, I tried to insert the chinese character 博 as well as the Unihan character 中 from a web page in my application. I then used the dump function to interrogate the contents of the field I input to thus:
select dump(field1, 1016) FROM tbl_test_ch
DUMP(FIELD1,1016)
Typ=1 Len=2 CharacterSet=AL16UTF16: 0,bf
Typ=1 Len=2 CharacterSet=AL16UTF16: 0,bf
Both characters seem to have suffered the same corruption.
The problem seems to happen in the other direction as well - even after verifying that the character detailed in the previous post was stored correctly, it is still displayed by my web app as an upside down question mark.
Do you have any suggestions on how to proceed?
Best regards,
Kenny.