How to read binary code chars in pl/sql

Question

How can I read binary code characters in my script. I need to ignore any binary chars before sending the output to a text file.
Thanks

Answer 1

If they are in fact characters in the 1-20 range, you can do somehting like this:
Create & populate the table:
create table badChar (
  buf VARCHAR2(1000)
insert into badChar values ( CHR(0) || CHR(1) )
insert into badChar values( CHR(2) || CHR(3) || CHR(4) || CHR(5) || CHR(6) || CHR(7) || CHR(8) );
insert into badChar values( CHR(9) || CHR(10) || CHR(11) || CHR(12) || CHR(13) || CHR(14) || CHR(15) );
insert into badChar values( CHR(16) || CHR(17) || CHR(18) || CHR(19) || CHR(20) || CHR(21) || CHR(22) );
insert into badChar values( 'Normal data' );View the data
SQL> select '*' || buf || '*' from badChar;
'*'||BUF||'*'
Normal dataTranslate the data, removing characters with ASCII values of 0-22
SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf
  1  select '*' ||
  2         translate( buf,
  3                    'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz' ||
  4                        CHR(0)  || CHR(1)  || CHR(2)  || CHR(3)  || CHR(4)  || CHR(5)  ||
  5                        CHR(6)  || CHR(7)  || CHR(8)  || CHR(9)  || CHR(10) || CHR(11) ||
  6                        CHR(11) || CHR(12) || CHR(13) || CHR(14) || CHR(15) || CHR(16) ||
  7                        CHR(16) || CHR(17) || CHR(18) || CHR(19) || CHR(20) || CHR(21) ||
  8                        CHR(22),
  9                    'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz' ) ||
10         '*'
11*   from badChar
SQL> /
'*'||TRANSLATE(BUF,'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'||CHR(0
Normal dataNote that I assume that the the "valid" values are a-z and A-Z. You can add numbers or other valid characters as needed.
If you were on Oracle 10g, you could use regular expressions to make this a lot simpler.
Justin
Distributed Database Consulting, Inc.
http://www.ddbcinc.com/askDDBC