Find and replacing special characters

Question

we have just discovered that after database unicode conversion, some special characters are starting to appear in the database after users copy and paste into the database.
For example from a table, we can identify it with:
SQL> select count(*) from table where column_name like '%' || chr(25) || '%';
COUNT(*)
15
This is for a table.
How can this be done to identify the characters for all tables because we are not sure of all the tables
Thanks

Answer 1

Hi,
Please try below pl/sql block to identify special characters in tables with respect to columns
set serveroutput on size 1000000
declare
procedure gooey(v_table varchar2, v_column varchar2) is
type t_id is table of number;
type t_dump is table of varchar2(20000);
type t_data is table of varchar2(20000);
l_id t_id;
l_data t_data;
l_dump t_dump;
cursor a is
select distinct column_name
from dba_tab_columns
where table_name = v_table
and data_type = 'VARCHAR2'
and column_name not in ('CUSTOMER_KEY','ADDRESS_KEY');
begin
for x in a loop
l_id := null;
l_data := null;
l_dump := null;
execute immediate 'SELECT ' || v_column || ', ' || x.column_name || ', ' ||
'dump(' || x.column_name || ')'
|| ' FROM ' || v_table
|| ' WHERE RTRIM((LTRIM(REPLACE(TRANSLATE(' || x.column_name ||
',''ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789@#$%^&*()_+
-=,!\`~{}./?:";''''[ ]'',''A''), ''A'', '''')))) IS NOT NULL'
bulk collect into l_id, l_data, l_dump;
if l_id is not null then
for k in 1..l_id.count loop
dbms_output.put_line(v_table || ' - ' || x.column_name || ' - ' ||
to_char(l_id(k),'999999999999'));
dbms_output.put_line(l_data(k));
dbms_output.put_line(l_dump(k));
dbms_output.put_line('*********************');
end loop;
end if;
end loop;
end gooey;
begin
gooey('table1','coln1');
gooey('table1','coln2');
gooey('table2','coln3');
end;
Like this you can get special characters for all the columns/particular column from table
Thanks,
Nitin