German characters taking more than one bytes

Question

Hi All,
I am trying to load a flat file (which I received in email), by SQL*loader into a table.
In few of the rows, not all, there are some German characters, like "hüri".
This data is going into a varchar2(30) column. In the text file, for this column (in the rows in question), there are 30 characters, **"If we count that special character as 1 character"**.
Means, if there was a normal English character in that string, instead of the German, this was a string of 30 characters and would be loaded without issues.
In this case, my load is failing. Error is, "ORA-12899: value too large for column SHORT_NAME (actual: 31, maximum: 30)".
Basically, that one character is taking space for more than 1 character in our database.
How can I get this character to fit in one character in database ???
Those on Unix, if I do the od command for that special character, I get this output.
od -c /tmp/a1
0000000 h 374 r i n \n
0000006
Details of my database are,
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.1.0 - 64bit Production
PL/SQL Release 11.2.0.1.0 - Production
CORE     11.2.0.1.0     Production
TNS for Linux: Version 11.2.0.1.0 - Production
NLSRTL Version 11.2.0.1.0 - Production
In v$parameter, I have these values,
nls_language=ENGLISH
nls_territory=UNITED KINGDOM
nls_sort=NULL
nls_date_language=NULL
nls_date_format=NULL
nls_currency=NULL
nls_numeric_characters=NULL
nls_iso_currency=NULL
nls_calendar=NULL
nls_time_format=NULL
nls_timestamp_format=NULL
nls_time_tz_format=NULL
nls_timestamp_tz_format=NULL
nls_dual_currency=NULL
nls_comp=BINARY
nls_length_semantics=BYTE
nls_nchar_conv_excp=FALSE
Heeeeelp ...
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Try to run:
alter table <your table> modify <your VARCHAR2 column> varchar2(30 char);Example:
SQL> desc t
Name                                      Null?    Type
X                                                  NUMBER(38)
S                                                  VARCHAR2(10)
SQL> alter table t modify s varchar2(10 char);
Table altered.
SQL> desc t;
Name                                      Null?    Type
X                                                  NUMBER(38)
S                                                  VARCHAR2(10 CHAR)Edited by: P. Forstmann on 2 déc. 2010 19:48