Problem with spanish characters

Question

Hello
I am using an existing and proven app written in visual foxpro with a recently installed Oracle11g database (have done this before without problems)
I am using Microsoft ODBC for Oracle and have no possibility of changing this. (always used this without problems)
If I insert a string in in a fixed length char field of the same length of the string (say char(30)) IF THE STRING DOES NOT HAVE SPECIAL CHARACTERS, everything goes as usual. However, if the string contains some spanish language chars (ó, é, á, ñ) the insert fails indicating that the string is too long. I suspect "somewhere" this characters are encoded in double-byte instead of single-byte.
My question is, which is the Oracle setting that allows/prevents this? I need special characters encoded in 1 byte. Language is Spanish.
Some settings that the Oracle DBA passed to me are
NLS_CHARACTERSET = AL32UTF8
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET= AL16UTF16
Any help will be appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

In the database character set AL23UTF8 (NLS_CHARACTERSET=AL23UTF8), accented Spanish characters occupy 2 bytes each. This cannot be changed.
Two possible solutions:
-- recreate the database using the character set WE8MSWIN1252
-- redefine the column from CHAR(30), which usually by default means CHAR(30 BYTE), to CHAR(30 CHAR). This means no more than 30 characters but up to 120 bytes (in AL32UTF8).
If you run your application with NLS_LANG=.WE8MSWIN1252 and you do not use byte-oriented SQL functions such as SUBSTRB, INSTRB, or LENGTHB, you will most probably see no functional difference between single-byte storage and multibyte storage of Spanish characters. On the client side, these characters will be single-byte.
-- Sergiusz