Programming

Hi,

I'm trying to load data into an Oracle DB. A Perl script opens a file that was created with vi on Unix, connects to the DB and inserts data.
All characters (some of which are special characters) in my data can be loaded except for one:
'
It turns into something else in the DB.

The other quotes are fine ‘ ' "

I suspect the problem has to do with encoding of the file and Unix and Oracle characters sets, but I know very little about this subject.

Any quick hints? Or link to some place where this subject is described?

Remember that in SQL, string literals are in ' and " is, by default, to making reserved words not recognized, like a column alias AS "Table". Sometimes, session or RDBMS options can make " work as an alternate to ' in matched pairs for string literals. Now, your PERL string literals are in ", so you have to escape any " in there. If you Oracle string data is presented using ', you need to escape any ' in there. Escapes are usually \ or doubling. You did not give a release, is this applicable: quoting string literals in 10g

Thanks for the quick reply.
That's not the problem though. The characters are all inserted into the DB, only one of the quotes is converted to something else.
In vi on Unix, the odd quote character looks like /264

Well, it does sound like your code page or whatever is way misaligned. Google up some info on how to inquire of the RDBMS character set, and how to set your client/connection character set. In ISO8859-1 or Latin 1, the \264 is the accent acute ´, not the single quote, and \140 is accent grave `, which some word processors like to use rather than the aymmetric apostrophe / single quote ' ! So, it is not quoting, it is code pages for funny punctuation.