You may want to try this to see what the non-printing characters are: select dump(foo),dump(bar),dump(baz) from mytable / Jared Still Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 4:34 PM, William Wagman <wjwagman@xxxxxxxxxxx>wrote: > Greetings, > > Running Oracle 10.2.0.3.0 on RHEL4, 64-bit. > > Table: > > foo VARCHAR2(300) > bar CHAR(1) > baz CHAR(1) > >