Charsets - java -oracle

Question

Hi,
I am trying to transfer data from an Oracle -Long field to an
CLOB field in another Oracle- database.
The transfer of the data works fine, except for the tranfer
of the euro -currency -sign.
The charsets of the databases are set to ISO8859-15.
This charset is supported on my operating system
Charset.availableCharsets()When i output the hex-representation of the
euro-sign I get the following:
ffffffef, ffffffbf, ffffffbd
according to the ISO8859-15 code-chart this should be 'A4' I guess.
I have tried various scenarious, e.g reading the input with
the encoding "ISO8859-15", reading it with "windows-1252" and
converting it to ISO8859-15, but without any success.
When I read the data via sqlplus(which also works with ISO8859-15)
I get the euro currency sign and I get a byte-value 128(which seems
to be correct). Here the charset conversion seems to be o.k..
I am using Windows-NT, with Oracle-jdbc-ThinClient.
somehow the oracle client does some characterset-conversion that
I am missing, but nevertheless I am just reading the bytes and
get wrong Hex-digits!!!?????.
thanks for any help,
regards,
alex
InputStream druckdat = rs.getBinaryStream(colDruckdat);
     try{
        //inputReader = new InputStreamReader(druckdat, "ISO8859-15");
     byte[] byteArr = new byte[10000];
        druckdat.read(byteArr);
     printHexString(byteArr);
     //String string = new String(byteArr, "windows-1251");
     //printHexString(string);
void printHexString(byte[] byteArr){
               for(int k=0; k<byteArr.length; k++){
                    if(k % 8 == 0)
                         System.out.println("\n");
                    System.out.print(Integer.toHexString(new Integer(byteArr[k]).intValue()));
                    //System.out.print(new Integer(byteArr[k]).intValue());
                    System.out.print(",   ");

Answer 1

i am not sure if the problems i had with oracle are identical to yours, but anyway here is what i found out:
i had a oracle 9i with database character set of ISO8859P1 and national character set UTF8. Problem was that when i wanted to insert or read non-8859-1 characters i just got garbage. Reason was the automatic charset conversion done by the thin driver which first converts to the database character set before sending the data to the db. if one uses a NCHAR data type the db then converts it to the national character set in use there. This obviously is a problem when the database character set is only a subset of the national character set, resulting in information loss.
unfortunately one has to use oracle-specific API (OraclePreparedStatement and its method setFormOfUse( types. NCHAR) so the thin driver doesn't use this conversion. This problem continues if one dynamically creates a SQL statement and wants to do an executeQuery() (standard jdbc API), it again gets converted automagically by the thin driver but OracleStatement has no method to suppress the conversion. So to avoid charset conversion one has to use the UNISTR function and encode the string to UTF-16 code points.
Of (only some) help were the jdbc developers guide and the globalization docs from oracle you can find on tahiti.oracle.com
i suspect you suffer from the same problem as 8859-1 and 8859-15 differ most prominently in the euro sign, and i guess your database character set is set to ISO8859P1.