Trying to get UTF-8 data in and out of an oracle.xdb.XMLType

Question

I need to be able to put unicode text into an oracle.xdb.XMLType and
then get it back out. I'm so close but it's still not quite working.
Here's what I'm doing...
// create a string with one unicode character (horizontalelipsis)
String xmlString = new String(
"<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n" +
"<utf8>\n" +
" <he val=\"8230\">\u2026</he>\n" +
"</utf8>\n");
// this is an oci8 connection
Connection conn = getconnection();
// this works with no exceptions
XMLType xmlType = XMLType.createXML(conn, xmlString);
// this is the problem here - BLOB b does not contain all the bytes
// from xmlType. It seems to be short 2 bytes.
BLOB b = xmlType.getBlobVal(871);
String xmlTypeString = new String(b.getBytes(1L, (int) b.length()), "UTF-8");
PrintStream out = new PrintStream(System.out, true, "UTF-8");
out.print(xmlTypeString);
out.close();
What I get from this is this...
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<utf8>
<he val="8230">[utf-8 bytes]</he>
</utf8
In the above, [utf-8 bytes] represents the correctly encoded UTF-8 bytes that
were returned. But the output is missing the final closing bracket and the
newline at the end. It seems that no matter what second argument I give b.getBytes(),
it always returns the above. Even
It seems that this code...
BLOB b = xmlType.getBlobVal(871);
always returns a BLOB that contains a few bytes short of what it should contain.
What am I doint wrong? I'm sure I'm missing something here.
Thanks much for your help.
Here's info about the environment I'm working in.
============================ SYSTEM INFORMATION ============================
SQL*Plus: Release 11.1.0.7.0 - Production on Fri May 15 11:54:34 2009
select * from nls_database_parameters
where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET'
returns...
WE8ISO8859P1
select * from nls_database_parameters
where parameter='NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET'
returns...
AL16UTF16
The operating system I'm working with is...
SunOS hostname 5.10 Generic_120011-14 sun4u sparc SUNW,Netra-T12

Answer 1

WE8ISO8859P1 does not support the ellipsis character. It is a WE8MSWIN1252 character. I wonder if your problem may have something to do with internal conversion to/from XML character reference (&#x2026). Unfortunately, I have no time to test. Please, try to use a simple loop and System.out.print to print all bytes of the return value of b.getBytes(1L, (int) b.length()). Also, check the value of b.length().
-- Sergiusz