ASCIISTR

The ASCIISTR function takes as its argument, either a string or any expression that resolves to a string, in any character set, and returns the ASCII version of the string in the database character set. Non-ASCII characters are converted to Unicode escapes.

SQL syntax

ASCIISTR ([N]'String')

Parameters

ASCIISTR has the parameter:

Parameter

Description

[N]'String'

The string or expression that evaluates to a string that is passed to the ASCIISTR function. The string can be in any character set. Value can be of any supported character data types including CHAR, VARCHAR, VARCHAR2, NCHAR, NVARCHAR, NVARCHAR2, CLOB, or NCLOB data types. Both TimesTen and Oracle Database data types are supported. The ASCII version of the string in the database character set is returned. Specify N if you want to pass the string in UTF-16 format.

Description

The ASCIISTR function enables you to see the representation of a string value that is not in the database character set.

Examples

The following example invokes the ASCIISTR function passing as an argument the string 'Aäa' in UTF-16 format. The ASCII version is returned in the WE8ISO8859P1 character set. The non-ASCII character ä is converted to Unicode encoding value:

Command> connect "dsn=test; ConnectionCharacterSet= WE8ISO8859P1";
Connection successful: DSN=test;UID=user1;DataStore=/datastore/user1/test;
DatabaseCharacterSet=WE8ISO8859P1;
ConnectionCharacterSet=WE8ISO8859P1;PermSize=32;
(Default setting AutoCommit=1)
Command> SELECT ASCIISTR (n'Aäa') FROM dual;
< A\00E4a >
1 row found.