SQL unicode to XML using XMLForest

Question

I'm using XMLForest to retrieve some data from the db. One of the columns has unicode characters such as "Ă". I use XMLForest to read in this data, but the result turns this Ă into a "?". How do I keep the unicode format? I need to output this xml to html using an xsl sheet, and the xsl sheet just converts the "?" as is.
Example:
table with firstnames, and lastnames
firstname lastname
Ăbram Smîth
I use XMLForest as:
SELECT XMLForest (table.firstname, table.lastname);
The result returns as:
<firstname>?bram</firstname><lastname>Sm?th</lastname>
So my xsl sheet returns the xml as just
?bram Sm?th
Is there a method I can follow such that I know what unicode characters are being used?
fyi: this is to run in a java application using Oracle JDBC. I use the following to get the XML string from the XMLType. This is after executing the query using an OraclePreparedStatement and putting the result into an OracleResultSet (ors).
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
oracle.xdb.XMLType xml = XMLType.createXML(ors.getOPAQUE(1));
builder.append(xml.getStringVal()+"\n");
xml.close();
System.out.println(builder.toString());

Answer 1

There is a slight work-around to this, but I wouldn't highly recommend it. Its just something that I was able to use, since our comany's database is using US7ASCII.
ASCIISTR will return the ASCII of the query result. When there is ascii that is not in the standard ASCII such as &#51425;, the character is replaced by its unicode value such as, "\C8E1". I parse the xml query result that is returned, for the character "\". Then using Java:
int i = queryResult.indexOf("\\");// i = the index of "\"
//there's usually 4 characters in the unicode, so i+1 to i+5.
String unicode = queryResult.substring(i+1,i+5);
int con = Integer.parseInt(unicode, 16);
char c = (char) con;
queryResult.replace(i, i+5, ""+c);//replace the ascii with actual character.
I replace the "\C8E1" in the query result with char c.
For the example that is provided, the query would be:
SELECT XMLElement("Row", XMLForest(ASCIISTR(data_value))) FROM test;
The result would return as:
<Row><DATA_VALUE>Abram Sm\00EEth</DATA_VALUE></Row>
the \00EE would be replaced with î.
Just an idea, if anyone else is in the same situation.