Hi, Looks like you have two different problems...: Your ALTER SESSION command is not correct, first you do not need commas in this command, second and worse ALTER SESSION doe not support to set NLS_CHARSET which is an environment only variable. You should try to use the NLS_LANG env variable which works at the client as well as the server level. The syntax is NLS_LANG = language_territory.charset So on you Linux box this should be something like: setenv NLS_LANG AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1 Here under a part of Oracle manual about that: <snip> This feature implicitly determines the language environment of the database for each session. An ALTER SESSION statement is automatically executed when a session connects to a database to set the values of the database parameters NLS_LANGUAGE and NLS_TERRITORY to those specified by the language and territory arguments of NLS_LANG. If NLS_LANG is not defined, no ALTER SESSION statement is executed. When NLS_LANG is defined, the implicit ALTER SESSION is executed for all instances to which the session connects, for both direct and indirect connections. If the values of NLS parameters are changed explicitly with ALTER SESSION during a session, the changes are propagated to all instances to which that user session is connected. </snip> Dominique -----Original Message----- From: Mark Woods [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2001 3:38 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Oracle drivers and 8bit (or multibyte) characters Hi, I've been having some trouble with a simple content management system written in CF, running on RedHat Linux with Apache and connecting to an Oracle 8i database. When an 8bit character (character with code between 128 and 255 inclusive) is added using one of the web forms, it's gets dropped to the 7bit ASCII range. The Merant ODBC driver and the Oracle 80 Native driver both drop 128 from the 8bit character codes, e.g. chr(233), eacute, becomes chr(105), i. I have worked around this through a combination of using HTMLEditFormat and having some custom character code translations, but it is not ideal as this database may be used to publish to print again in the future (ok, I can un-escape characters, but why should I need to?). I have tried using the Oracle ALTER SESSION statement at the start of transactions to try and change the NLS_LANGUAGE, NLS_TERRITORY and NLS_CHARSET environment variables for the connection, but I think I may have the syntax wrong as I'm getting a "missing or invalid option" error. I've included my statement below, if anyone knows what's wrong, please let me know. Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a workaround? Can I force the drivers to send a correct ALTER SESSION statement when opening a connection? Should this be necessary, i.e. is there something amiss with the Oracle DBMS config that connecting clients are using the default Oracle charset of 7bit ASCII rather than the charset which has been set on the server, ISO-8859-1 (AFAIK using the NLS_LANG environment variable). Thanks Mark now, that alter session statement: ----------------------------------- ALTER SESSION SET NLS_LANGUAGE = 'AMERICAN', NLS_TERRITORY = 'AMERICA', NLS_CHARSET = 'WE8ISO8859P1' ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Structure your ColdFusion code with Fusebox. Get the official book at http://www.fusionauthority.com/bkinfo.cfm Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
