French Characters storing Problem

Question

Hi All,
I'm having a problem of not able to store the french characters in the table.
My Oracle server character set is set to WE8MSWIN1252.
My client character set is ISO8859.
As I understand MSWIN1252 is super set of ISO8859. so storing a French characters should not be a problem. but still I'm not able to store french characters in the table..
Please give me some inputs on this.
Thanks in advance.
Warm Regards,
Vaishnavi

Answer 1

On the Client how is NLS_LANG set exactly ?
$ echo $NLS_LANG
AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1
$ sqlplus "/ as sysdba"
SQL*Plus: Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production on Thu Dec 8 12:08:01 2005
Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
SQL> select * from v$nls_parameters where parameter like '%CHARACTERSET%';
PARAMETER                      VALUE
NLS_CHARACTERSET               WE8MSWIN1252
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET         AL16UTF16
SQL> conn test/test
Connected.
SQL> create table temp (a number, b varchar2(20));
Table created.
SQL> insert into temp values (3, 'vaishé');
1 row created.
SQL> select * from temp;
         A B
         3 vaishé
SQL> exit
Disconnected from Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
$ unset NLS_LANG
$ sqlplus test/test
SQL*Plus: Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production on Thu Dec 8 12:10:59 2005
Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
SQL> insert into temp values (3, 'vaishé');
1 row created.
SQL> select * from temp;
         A B
         3 vaishe
         3 vaish?
SQL> exit
Disconnected from Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
$ export NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1
$ sqlplus test/test
SQL*Plus: Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production on Thu Dec 8 12:11:49 2005
Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
SQL> select * from temp;
         A B
         3 vaishé
         3 vaish¿
SQL>