Could not able to display the russian characters on HP-UX.

[kumasudh]

Hi,

I am not able to display the russian characters on my HP-UX11i server.When i try to fetch a russian string from a table from my database through sqldeveloper, the russian string is displayed properly but when i give the same query from sqlplus it return some junk character string .Here are the setting details.

NLS_LANG is been set to "russian_cis.CL8ISO8859P5"

and the locale is

#locale
LANG=ru_RU.utf8
LC_CTYPE="ru_RU.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="ru_RU.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="ru_RU.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="ru_RU.utf8"
LC_TIME="ru_RU.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="ru_RU.utf8"
LC_ALL=

could somebody help me to troubleshoot this ?

Thanks and Regards

[Mustafa Gulercan]

hi;

Convert the strings or file containing the strings to UTF-8 using 'iconv'

For example:

iconv -f iso81 -t utf8 > file.utf8

regards,
mustafa

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

The NLS_LANG variable affects the database only.
The "locale" command lists the variables that affect the OS.

In your case, your database is using ISO-8859-5 character set, while your OS is configured for Unicode.

If you want to change the OS-level settings to match the data in your database, you would have to set LANG to "ru_RU.iso88595" and then configure your terminal (emulator) to interpret the incoming characters as ISO-8859-5 character set and display them correctly.

If sqlplus already translates the output from your database to Unicode, there might be a problem with the Unicode UTF-8 support of your terminal (emulator).

What exactly do you see?

- If you see two or more junk characters per each russian character, your sqlplus is outputting Unicode UTF-8 but your display is misinterpreting the data as some other character set.

- If you see one junk character per each russian character and the junk character is always the same, it might be the "I cannot display this character" symbol of the Unicode system. A possible cause is that your terminal emulator does not know where to find a Unicode font that would contain the necessary russian character symbols.

On the other hand, it might be the "this is an invalid UTF-8 character" symbol, which would mean that your system is outputting ISO-8859-5 while your terminal expects Unicode.

MK

[kumasudh]

Hi Mike,

Thanks a lot for the suggestions . Indeed the problem was becase my terminal was supporting the "iso88595" character set. So i tried setting
export LANG=ru_RU.iso88595


- launch an hpterm window with is8859.5 fontset

example:
dtterm -fn -ibm--bold-r-block--23-160-100-100-c-110-iso8859-5&

this worked .

Thanks once again for the help