When I export Chinese characters from Oracle forms to Excel, they are not Chinese anymore

Question

I have problem with Chinese characters when I export them from Oracle forms 10g to Excel on Windows 7. Although they look like Chinese but they are not Chinese characters. Take this into consideration that I have already changed the language of my computer to Chinese and restarted my computer. I use owa_sylk utility and call the excel report like:

    v_url := 'http://....../excel_reports.rep?sqlString=' ||
       v_last_query      || 
       '&font_name='     ||       
       'Arial Unicode MS'||
       '&show_null_as='  ||
       ' '               ; 

web.show_document(v_url,'_self');

Here you can see what it looks like: enter image description here

Interestingly, when I change the language of my computer to English, this column is empty. Besides, I realized that if I open the file with a text editor then it has the right Chinese word, but when we open it with Excel we have problem.

Does anyone has a clue?

Thanks

How do you "export to Excel"? Which program/tool do you use? — Aaron Digulla
Hi Aaron, I edited the question. I hope you have enough information now :) — Dax
possible duplicate of Excel does not show Chinese characters — Raymond Chen

Olga H Olga H · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-07T18:49:05

Yes, the problem comes from different encodings. If DB uses UTF-8 and you need to send ASCII to Excel, you can convert data right inside the owa_sylk. Use function convert.

For ex. in function owa_sylk.print_rows change p( line ); on p(convert(line, 'ZHS32GB18030','AL32UTF8')); Where 'ZHS32GB18030' is one of Chinese ASCII and 'AL32UTF8' - UTF-8.

To choose encoding parameters use Appendix A

You can also do *SELECT * FROM V$NLS_VALID_VALUES WHERE parameter = 'CHARACTERSET'* to see all the supported encodings.

When I export Chinese characters from Oracle forms to Excel, they are not Chinese anymore

2 Answers