Oracle column contents displayed as "?", how to fix it?

Question

In column COMMENTS of dba_col_comments table some symbols appear as "?". Probably these are replaced Chinese symbols.

PL/SQL Developer and SQLPlus show the same results:

SQL> SELECT * FROM dba_col_comments WHERE table_name='XX' AND COLUMN_NAME='OO';

OWNER   TABLE_NAME  COLUMN_NAME               COMMENTS
------- ---------- -------------- -------------------------  
GAME    XX          OO             1?????????2?????????????


SQL> select userenv('language') from dual;

USERENV('LANGUAGE')
----------------------------------
SIMPLIFIED CHINESE_CHINA.AL32UTF8

How to know actual symbols, which replaced by the question marks?

The question mark is the way that the client you are using is saying that it was not able to process the character encoding of that specific char(s). You may have to set your client to use the same character enconding as the one used to create that comments. — Jorge Campos, Oct 17 '15 at 07:46

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 17 '15 at 07:08

If your db is storing the ? literally then I am not sure, but you can get the ascii value of the second character in comments with something like below

SELECT ASCII(SUBSTR(COMMENTS,2,1)) FROM DBA_COL_COMMENTS WHERE TABLE_NAME='XX' AND COLUMN_NAME='OO';

If you want to see third, use 3 in substr parameter.

If you are getting result as 63 (ascii of ?) then we need to find another way to see this. Check and let us know.

Oracle column contents displayed as "?", how to fix it?

1 Answers1