Preventing sqlplus truncation of column names, without individual column formatting

Question

By default sqlplus truncates column names to the length of the underlying data type. Many of the column names in our database are prefixed by the table name, and therefore look

Answer 1

It's a bit of a hack if you don't need or want XML formatting, but you should be able to use the DBMS_XMLGEN package. This script should give you an XML file for an arbitrary query with the full column name as the tag name.

VARIABLE resultXML clob;
SET LONG 100000; -- Set to the maximum size of the XML you want to display (in bytes) 
SET PAGESIZE 0;

DECLARE
   qryCtx DBMS_XMLGEN.ctxHandle;
BEGIN
  qryCtx := dbms_xmlgen.newContext('SELECT * from scott.emp');

  -- now get the result
  :resultXML := DBMS_XMLGEN.getXML(qryCtx);

  --close context
  DBMS_XMLGEN.closeContext(qryCtx);
END;
/

print resultXML