Special character in some of the employee records

Question

Hi,
I have found special character in some of the employee records which is causing some reports to error out. Our instance is configured for English language and these special characters are unrecognized by the application. I have attached some employee names with the special character below.
Request you to please look into this and reply ASAP.
===
Employee Number      Full Name
1278     M_ü_ller-Seydlitz, Mrs Hilda Suzanne
1009     Evas, Mrs Sîan* Elynda
===
Regards
Parvathi Arun
[phone]
[email protected]

Answer 1

first you need to create a database function like the one below.
the query to identify those records is then the below:
select full_name from per_people_x
where is_not_valid_text(full_name) = 'N'
you can use the function also to verify other fields like addresses and so on.
the corrective action according to me should be a manual one, meaning open the form and update the names not compliant.
thanks
regards
create or replace
function is_not_valid_text (p_text in varchar2) return varchar2 is
v_is_valid varchar2(100) := 'Y';
v_length number := length(p_text);
begin
for i in 1 .. v_length loop
if not ( -- allowed char
ascii(substr(p_text, i, 1)) between 65 and 90 -- from A to Z
or ascii(substr(p_text, i, 1)) between 97 and 122 -- from a to z
or ascii(substr(p_text, i, 1)) = 32
or ascii(substr(p_text, i, 1)) = 46
) then
v_is_valid := 'N';
exit;
end if;
end loop;
return v_is_valid;
end is_not_valid_text;
Edited by: Giuseppe Bonavita on 10-Dec-2012 11:43