UTF 8 from Oracle tables

Question

The client has asked for a number of tables to be extracted into csv's, all done no problem. They've just asked we make sure the files are always in UTF 8 format.

How do I check this is actually the case. Or even better force it to be so, is it something i can set in a procedure before running a query perhaps?

The data is extracted from an Oracle 10g database.

What should I be checking?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can check the database character set with the following query:

select value from nls_database_parameters 
where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET'

If it says AL32UTF8 then your database is in the format what you need and if the export does not impair it then your are done.

You may read about Oracle globalization support here, and here about NLS parameters like the above.

Answer 2

How, exactly, are you generating the CSV files? Depending on the exact architecture, there will be different answers.

If you are, for example, using SQL*Plus to extract the data, you would need to set the NLS_LANG on the client machine to something appropriate (i.e. AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8) to force the data to be sent to the client machine in UTF-8. If you are using other approaches, NLS_LANG may or may not be important.