I'll try and make it a fair reflection of my actual query. It's more to settle my confusion.
Let's start at the beginning.
A web front end hosted somewhere and numerous clients inserting data into web forms which is sent to and Oracle 10G database via stored procs. I have no idea of client settings nor the web server settings.
So I have data in an oracle database which I am querying remotely via SQL* Plus or Toad depending on my current mood. I have never seen how or by whome the data is inserted.
The data when I query it has a very thick pipe includes text similar to 'Some text etc blah |PERSONAL| some more text etc' The pipes are extremely thick.
The client has said, 'get me that data and make sure it's in UTF-8'
So my local client NLS_LANG is AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8 and my text includes the thick pipes. However i'm told there supposed to be quotes. I have looked around and decided that the problem is I do not the format used to insert the data, Oracle supposedly correctly converts. The database charset is AL32UTF8.
So oracle received some data, converted if necessary to UTF8 and I pulled it out in UTF8 and it's a bit garbled. So what do I do.
Do I need the nls_lang of the clients and actually extract into this format, then convert to UTF8 myself? Or is the data in fact pipes and not quotes at all?
Can someone thoroughly explain what is happening, it doesn't need to be in context to my problem, i'll do the mapping there. But what is really happening.
FYI the data is in a 'LONG' column datatype as well. Thanks