Importing extended ASCII into Oracle

Question

I have a procedure that imports a binary file containing some strings. The strings can contain extended ASCII, e.g. CHR(224), 'à'. The procedure is taking a RAW and converting the BCD bytes into characters in a string one by one.

The problem is that the extended ASCII characters are getting lost. I suspect this is due to their values meaning something else in UTF8.

I think what I need is a function that takes an ASCII character index and returns the appropriate UTF8 character.

Update: If I happen to know the equivalent Oracle character set for the incoming text can I then convert the raw bytes to UTF8? The source text will always be single byte.

Answer 1

There's no such thing as "extended ASCII." Or, to be more precise, so many encodings are supersets of ASCII, sharing the same first 127 code points, that the term is too vague to be meaningful. You need to find out if the strings in this file are encoded using UTF-8, ISO-8859-whatever, MacRoman, etc.

The answer to the second part of your question is the same. UTF-8 is, by design, a superset of ASCII. Any ASCII character (i.e. 0 through 127) is also a UTF-8 character. To translate some non-ASCII character (i.e. >= 128) into UTF-8, you first need to find out what encoding it's in.