Stay away from 8-bit character sets if you can. In my 9i course the instructor said that Oracle is gradually moving toward 16-bit character sets, including unicode. Patrice. -----Original Message----- From: Robson, Peter [mailto:pgro@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: March 16, 2004 7:17 AM To: 'oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx' Subject: Oracle does not (always) understand French - was RE: Use of the q uote / apostrophe in text fields More on a subject not unlike the apostrophe. One of our people entered the following text string into an Oracle field: 'CRÈME DE LA CRÈME' This field was then inserted into another table on a remote instance, checked for comparison, and the French accents were found to have gone: 'CREME DE LA CREME' Do a dump on this, and: Typ=96 Len=17: 67,82,69,77,69,32,68,69,32,76,65,32,67,82,69,77,69 ... notice that the third character, '69' SHOULD be '200'. Is it because Oracle prefers 'soixante-neuf' but doesn't like French... ! Actually, this conundrum is all down to different character sets ( WE8ISO8859P1, and US7ASCII ) being established on different instances. Oh Really... Just something to watch out for. peter edinburgh ********************************************************************* This e-mail message, and any files transmitted with it, are confidential and intended solely for the use of the addressee. If this message was not addressed to you, you have received it in error and any copying, distribution or other use of any part of it is strictly prohibited. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the sender and do not necessarily represent those of the British Geological Survey. The security of e-mail communication cannot be guaranteed and the BGS accepts no liability for claims arising as a result of the use of this medium to transmit messages from or to the BGS. . http://www.bgs.ac.uk *********************************************************************