Invalid Trademark Character Saved in Oracle

[Neel Gutierrez]

We are experiencing a problem with invalid characters being saved thru
a java-based web application in the Oracle database for some special
characters that were copied and pasted from a Microsoft Word file.
One of the requirements of the application is the ability to
cut-and-paste text from Word and save it into the database. But for
some reason the trademark and ellipsis symbol are not being saved
correctly…they are getting converted to a value that is equivalent to
an inverted question mark instead. And because of this when you view
text that has these symbols using a reporting tool such as Actuate,
the invalid character is displayed instead. There is no problem
displaying these characters back to the user…that is, if/when the
application reads it from the database and displays it to the user
thru JSP pages. Has anyone come across this problem before? Any
suggestions and/or recommendations as how to fix it? So far I've tried
the line of code: request.setcharacterencoding("utf-8)...still does
not fix the problem. Appreciate any help.

 

[Steve Bosman]

Obvious question but, are you sure that your reporting tool understands
Unicode? Have you tried entering the special characters directly into
the database with another tool to see if the reporting tool can handle
them then. With the behaviour you describe it sounds like your java
code is fine IMO.

 

[Matt Parker]

And because of this when you view
text that has these symbols using a reporting tool such as Actuate,
the invalid character is displayed instead. There is no problem
displaying these characters back to the user…that is, if/when the
application reads it from the database and displays it to the user
thru JSP pages. Has anyone come across this problem before? Any
suggestions and/or recommendations as how to fix it? So far I've tried
the line of code: request.setcharacterencoding("utf-8)...still does
not fix the problem. Appreciate any help.

I've had to do this before... Basically, Word has "special" characters that
don't necessarily map to standard language encodings. The way we did it was
to have a lookup and store the HTML equivalent (for want of a better
standard) in the database. You can thank Microsoft for this one.

Matt