Problem on communication Oracle 10g / java

Question

when i wrote in french and i store special characters as ' é ' , ' è ' , ' â '... and i try to select these data from a java application( on the NetBeans IDE 6.7) with a 1.6 JDK, these special characters are showen as '?' !!! so hwo cani do to get my data corretly. thanks

Answer 1

Character interpretation is up to the client- as long as the database character set can handle a specific character, the client software is responsible for accepting '<char code>' from the database and rendering it as the proper '<char>'. If the client doesn't know the code point '<char code>' you get the inverted question mark.
Are you running the WE (Western European) charset or did you install the Universal one? A quick way to check that is to do a control file trace backup and check the create controlfile SQL generated ...
$ sqlplus /nolog;
show parameter user_dump;
... --- s.b. ...admin/XE/udump
alter database backup controlfile to trace;
And check the ...udump directory, view the latest .trc file- CREATE CONTROLFILE ... ; if its universal should be:
CHARACTER SET AL32UTF8
;