How to retrive Original Character in Unicode Format from UTF8

Question

Our Database is enabled UTF8 format.User entered some data through UI(html forms),which is stored as â?? (whose ascii values are 50082,49792,49817 respectively,as the data is displaying in different way here ,I am giving here with the ascii values)in to the Database.When we retrive the data into UI or into a text file(.txt) it is displaying/storing as ’(Ascii value is 15712189).How to check for is that character correct or not.

Answer 1

Ashok,
What is your NLS_LANG setting on the client machine where FORMS is running?
To see if the value is stored properly in the database you can use the DUMP command. You can find this in the SQL Reference. But here is a desription:
he syntax of the function call is:
DUMP( <value> [, <format> [, <offset> [, <length> ] ] ] )
where:
value - is the value to be displayed
format - is a number which describes the format in which bytes of the value are to be displayed: 8 - means octal, 10 - means decimal, 16 - means hexadecimal; other values between 0 and 16 mean decimal; values greater then 16 are a little confusing and mean: print bytes as ASCII characters if they correspond to printable ASCII codes, print them as "^x" if they correspond to ASCII control codes and print them in hexadecimal otherwise; adding 1000 to the format number will add character set information for the character data type values to the return value offset - is the offset of the first byte of the value to display; negative values mean counting from the end length - is the number of bytes to display. So for example,
SQL> SELECT DUMP(col,1016)FROM table ;
Typ=1 Len=39 CharacterSet=UTF8: 227,131,143,227,131,170
returns the value of a column consisting of 3 Japanese characters in UTF8 encoding . For example the 1st char is 227(*255)+131. You will probably need to convert this to UCS2 to verify the codepoint value with the Unicode Standard version 3.0.