any chance to know the charset of a remote database?

[Max Durham]

i need to retrieve some chinese characters from db, well, seems that's sth i cant do properly without knowing its charset first

anyone thoughts?
Regards

[Tom Blough]

What database? MySQL has SHOW CHARACTER SET since 4.1.

Cheers,

[Max Durham]

i meant via jdbc, i gotta write a snippet to tell what the charset is in the server side and then retrieve the character with corresponding charset in the client side
eg.
server client
utf8 iso-8859-1
gbk gbk

any thoughts?
Cheers

[Charu Singh]

I'm facing exactly same problem, I have to dislay some Danish characters.
When I try to do so I get a '?' in place of the character.

Tried converting the String returned from <resultset>.getString("TITLE"); method in to Byte array and passing it to String constructor, that is :-> String(byte[],"UTF-16") that creates String out of the byte array using the Encoding passed as second parameter.

[Tom Blough]

Again, what database? Using JDBC with MySQL you execute "SHOW CHARACTER SET;". The single row result set then contains the character set name the database uses.

Refer to Chapter 10 in MySQL documentation for more info on character set support in MySql.

[Pawan M Singh]

You can use "utl_i18n.get_default_charset" function in Oracle to get the CharacterSet.
Syntax :
utl_i18n.get_default_charset(language IN VARCHAR2,
context IN PLS_INTEGER DEFAULT GENERIC_CONTEXT,
iswindows IN BOOLEAN DEFAULT FALSE) RETURN VARCHAR2;

Like :
SELECT utl_i18n.get_default_charset(<Your_language_name>,0) FROM dual;