Data other than english language

Question

Hi,
I am using Oracle 10g. I am having a table in which there are two columns, one column contains the data which may not be in english. Whenever I populating the data, I am getting some junk characters in that field. Now, if I want to know how many records do I have which are not in english, how to populate only those records ?
Regards

Answer 1

One possible way:
with dummy_data as (
   select 'ABC123' text from dual union all
   select 'Abc' text from dual
select text
from dummy_data
where regexp_like(text,'[^a-zA-Z]')
;The regular expression means "if text contains something a character +not+ (the ^) in the ranges a-z or A-Z."
Another way:
with dummy_data as (
   select 'ABC123' text from dual union all
   select 'Abc' text from dual
select text
from dummy_data
where translate(text,'§ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz','§') is not null
;Translate translates the first character of the first string to the first character of the second string, the second character of the first string to the second character of the second string, etc.
So § translates to § (unchanged in other words) and A translates to null, B translates to null, etc.
If text contains only a-z or A-Z that translate will turn the entire string to null - if any other characters exist, it will be not null.
There may be as many ways to do this as there are programmers in the world :-)