Oracle / PLSQL: CONVERT Function

Description

The Oracle/PLSQL: CONVERT function converts a string from one character set to another. The only practical use of the function is to correct data that has been stored in a wrong character set.

Syntax

The syntax of the CONVERT function is:

CONVERT( <character_string> , <dest_char_set> , optional <source_char_set> )

Arguments

  • The <dest_char_set > argument is the value to be converted. It can be any of the datatypes CHAR, VARCHAR2, NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, CLOB, or NCLOB.
  • The <dest_char_set > argument is the name of the character set to which char is converted.
  • The <source_char_set> argument is the name of the character set in which char is stored in the database. The default value is the database character set.

Note

Popular character sets include:

Character Set Description
US7ASCII US 7-bit ASCII character set
WE8ISO8859P1 ISO 8859-1 West European 8-bit character set
EE8MSWIN1250 Microsoft Windows East European Code Page 1250
WE8MSWIN1252 Microsoft Windows West European Code Page 1252
WE8EBCDIC500 IBM West European EBCDIC Code Page 500
UTF8 Unicode 3.0 Universal character set CESU-8 encoding form
AL32UTF8 Unicode 5.0 Universal character set UTF-8 encoding form

Example

This example converts an ISO 8859-1 West European 8-bit character set to a US 7-bit ASCII character set.

SELECT CONVERT('Ä Ê Í Õ Ø A B C D E ', 'US7ASCII', 'WE8ISO8859P1')
Results in:
---------------------
A E I ? ? A B C D E ?
 See Also:
T-SQL: CAST and CONVERT
MySQL: CAST and CONVERT

 

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