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I've been tasked with determining if our web platform can be 'localized' to Japanese, and how to do so. The platform is PL/SQL based in an Oracle 10g database. We have localized it for French Canadian and Brazilian Portuguese in the past, but I'm wondering what issues I may run into with Japanese (Kanji, I believe). Am I correct that Japanese is a double-byte char set while the others we've used are single-byte? How will this impact code and/or database table structure and access?

The various sentences/phrases/statements are stored in a database table and are looked up as needed based on the user's id and language setting. The table field that stores the 'text' is defined as a CLOB. It's often read into a VARCHAR2 variable.

I tried to copy/past some Japanese characters into the table via a direct paste to the field in a TOAD schema browser. That resulted in '??' being displayed.

Is there anything I have to do in order to be able to store Japanese characters in that table? Or access/display them from that table?

DaveKub
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1 Answers1

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Check your database character set by

SELECT * 
FROM V$NLS_PARAMETERS 
WHERE PARAMETER IN ('NLS_CHARACTERSET', 'NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET');

If the character set support Japanese (e.g. AL32UTF8) it should be no big deal to localize your application also to Japanese. Changing the character set on an existing database is also possible but requires some effort, see Character Set Migration

Check also this answer for topics related to database character set vs. client character set, i.e. NLS_LANG setting.

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Wernfried Domscheit
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