In oracle how do I change my session to display UTF8

Question

I can t figure out Oracle s encryptic syntax for the life of me   This is Oracle 10g  My session s NLS LANGUAGE is currently defaulting to AMERICAN  I need to be able to display UTF8 characters   Below are some of my attempts  all incorrect   ALTER SESSION SET NLS LANGUAGE  UTF8  ALTER SESSION SET NLS LANGUAGE  AMERICAN AMERICA UTF8    What s the secret command

User · Answer

Therefore  before starting    sqlplus  on OS  run the followings    On Windows  set NLS LANG AMERICAN AMERICA UTF8 On Unix  Solaris and Linux  centos etc   export NLS LANG AMERICAN AMERICA UTF8   It would also be advisable to set env variable in your   bash profile   on start up script   This is the place where other ORACLE env variables  ORACLE SID  ORACLE HOME  are usually set   just fyi - SQL Developer is good at displaying handling non-English UTF8 characters

User · Answer

The character set is part of the locale  which is determined by the value of NLS LANG   As the documentation makes clear this is an operating system variable      NLS LANG is set as an environment   variable on UNIX platforms  NLS LANG   is set in the registry on Windows   platforms    Now we can use ALTER SESSION to change the values for a couple of locale elements  NLS LANGUAGE and NLS TERRITORY   But not  alas  the character set   The reason for this discrepancy is - I think - that the language and territory simply effect how Oracle interprets the stored data  e g  whether to display a comma or a period when displaying a large number   Wheareas the character set is concerned with how the client application renders the displayed data   This information is picked up by the client application at startup time  and cannot be changed from within

User · Answer

Okay  per http   www oracle com technology tech globalization htdocs nls lang 20faq htm      NLS LANG cannot be changed by ALTER   SESSION  NLS LANGUAGE and   NLS TERRITORY can  However   NLS LANGUAGE and  or NLS TERRITORY   cannot be set as  standalone    parameters in the environment or   registry on the client    Evidently the  right  solution is  before logging into Oracle at all  setting the following environment variable   export NLS LANG AMERICAN AMERICA UTF8   Oracle gets a big fat F for usability

[oracle] In oracle, how do I change my session to display UTF8?

Examples related to oracle

Examples related to utf-8