Weird Characters

[Nick_Gale_(Guest)]

Can anyone shed any light on this???____I have a client who^s having a problem with a character field display within a report. It^s a large field (2000) sitting in an Oracle table.____Basically they were running Oracle 9 on the server with Oracle 8 clients (and ODBC drivers) perfectly happily, they decided to upgrade to Oracle 9 on the client side and the character field within the report now displays weird characters rather than the (English) notes.____Thanks.

[Andrew_Fowke_(Guest)]

The problems you are having are caused by the NLS_LANG settings on your host machine not matching that of the database.____Update the settings on your machine so that they match__

[Andrew_Fowke_(Guest)]

To check settings follow this guide:____On Windows: ____On Windows you have two possible options, normally the NLS_LANG is set in the registry, but it can also be set in the environment, however this is not often done. The value in the environment takes precedence over the value in the registry and is used for ALL Oracle_Homes on the server. Also note that any USER environment variable takes precedence over any SYSTEM environment variable (this is Windows behavior, and has nothing to do with Oracle) if set. ____To check if it^s set in the environment: ____ SQL> HOST ECHO %NLS_LANG% __If this reports just %NLS_LANG% back, the variable is not set in the environment. ____If it^s set it reports something like ____ ENGLISH_UNITED KINGDOM.WE8ISO8859P1 __If NLS_LANG is not set in the environment, check the value in the registry: ____SQL>@.[%NLS_LANG%]. ____If you get something like: ____ Unable to open file.[ENGLISH_UNITED KINGDOM.WE8ISO8859P1].__The "file name" between the braces is the value of the registry parameter. ____If you get this as result: ____Unable to open file ".[%NLS_LANG%]." then the parameter NLS_LANG is also not set in the registry. ____Note the @.[%NLS_LANG%]. technique reports the NLS_LANG known by the SQL*Plus executable, it will not read the registry itself. But if you run the HOST command first and the NLS_LANG is not set in the environment then you can be sure the variable is set in the registry if the @.[%NLS_LANG%]. returns a valid value. ____All other NLS parameters can be retrieved by a:____SELECT * FROM NLS_SESSION_PARAMETERS; ______Then to set your NLS_LANG Setting on your machine go to:____Control Panel__System__Click the Advanced tab and select Environment Variables__