Format string literal output?

Question

Trying to format the output of sqlplus for a string literal, but can't seem to get it to work. If I SELECT a literal, the literal column's width is always 32 characters long. Kinda makes things look a bit wonky.
For instance, if I try:
SELECT ',' FROM DUAL
My output looks like this:
It's a bit frustrating when I'm trying to do something like:
SELECT lastname, ',' , firstname from mytable;
I'll COL lastname FORMAT to my heart's desire, but not luck.
Weird thing is that two of my servers are behaving differently. They should be set up the same, but obviously there's some environment setting or something that's different. On the "good" server, that one "SELECT ',' from dual;" query returns this:
Any ideas?
Edited by: user9526990 on Mar 12, 2009 2:38 PM
Ok, so the WYSIWYG editor is overriding my formatting. That horizontal line above should just be 32 consecutive hyphens (--- etc), but it's rendering it as a line.
Edited by: user9526990 on Mar 12, 2009 2:39 PM

Answer 1

In all honesty, I think I could just concatenate it and call it good, but at this point I'm just wondering why it doesn't work the same way on both servers.
What happens is that we have a scheduled job that runs this query every night and dumps the output into a file that's used by some other processes:
whenever oserror exit sql.oscode
whenever sqlerror exit sql.sqlcode
spool D:\output\file.txt
set pages 0
set lines 80
set head off
set echo off
set verify off
set feedback off
column owner format a20
column table_name format a33
column mycolumn format a12
select l.owner,',', l.table_name,',', l.mycolumn from tablename l;
spool off
exit
Frankly, that snippet's been with the company longer than I have, so I'm not sure why the original author opted for this method rather than just concatenating. But, as I mentioned, I'm more curious about why it doesn't behave the same way on both boxes now.