How to determine the language(English, Chinese…) of a given string in Oracle?

Question

How to determine the language (English, Chinese...) of a given sting (table column value) in Oracle(multi language environment)?

Answer 1

Do you mean the language as "what language this word belongs to" or as in "character encoding"?

For the first case I think there are only heuristics, I am not sure if Oracle Database ships any. Oracle Ultra Search has an statistical language recognizer.

In the second case: the encoding is always the system encoding of the database (but you actually should not use it, as it gets converted to your local representation when you retrieve it (depending on your client framework and driver of course).