UTF8 and Traditional chinese display problem

Question

I have having problems displaying chinese because I am trying to pull data from 2 difference sources into a 3rd source.
Question 1
I am using Oracle 8.17 on Sun Solaris - (in China).
The NLS_LANG on that machine (Machine name is CNCIM) is American. The NLS_CHARACTERSET is ZHS16GBK.
We are using Java to write data into this server. The data has been stored as UTF8.
When I use TOAD, to look at the chinese characters, I cannot see the actual characters.
What I see in TOAD is something like this
上海市山东中路145号
Convert function does not seem to work. Can someone advice me how I can see the raw data in chinese?
Question 2
Currently, I am also trying to import the above UTF8 data into my Local Oracle Machine (APDM)
The NLS_LANG on that machine is American. The NLS_CHARACTERSET is WE8ISO8859P1.
And at the sametime, I am trying to import information from SQL2000 into Local Oracle Machine (APDM).
I was told that the data in SQL2000 has been setup as tradtional Chinese.
What type of settings should I have on my local machine(APDM) to allow me to view Chinese data (From CNCIM - UTF8) and to see the SQL2000(traditional chinese) data at the same time? Should this settings
be configured for my client too?

Answer 1

My hunch is that Toad either does not support the display of Chinese characters, at least not without setting your Windows regional settings to Chinese. Can you retrieve the data via your Java application?
If your database character set is ZHS16GBK, that should be the character set that the data is stored in the database. If your Java application is sending over UTF-8 encoded data, you need to ensure that the NLS_LANG settings on the client machine identify the data as UTF-8 so that Oracle can do the necessary character set conversion.
If your local database is using the ISO 8859-1 character set, it cannot store Chinese data. You would need to create a new database with a character set that supports Chinese if you wanted to store Chinese data there.
Justin
Distributed Database Consulting, Inc.
http://www.ddbcinc.com/askDDBC