Finding and removing non ascii characters from an Oracle Varchar2

Question

We are currently migrating one of our oracle databases to UTF8 and we have found a few records that are near the 4000 byte varchar limit. When we try and migrate these reco

Answer 1

Thanks, this worked for my purposes. BTW there is a missing single-quote in the example, above.

REGEXP_REPLACE (COLUMN,'[^' || CHR (32) || '-' || CHR (127) || ']', ' '))

I used it in a word-wrap function. Occasionally there was an embedded NewLine/ NL / CHR(10) / 0A in the incoming text that was messing things up.

Answer 2

In a single-byte ASCII-compatible encoding (e.g. Latin-1), ASCII characters are simply bytes in the range 0 to 127. So you can use something like [\x80-\xFF] to detect non-ASCII characters.

Answer 3

You can try something like following to search for the column containing non-ascii character :

select * from your_table where your_col <> asciistr(your_col);

Answer 4

I wouldn't recommend it for production code, but it makes sense and seems to work:

SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(COLUMN,'[^' || CHR(1) || '-' || CHR(127) || '],'')

Answer 5

I had a similar issue and blogged about it here. I started with the regular expression for alpha numerics, then added in the few basic punctuation characters I liked:

select dump(a,1016), a, b
from
 (select regexp_replace(COLUMN,'[[:alnum:]/''%()> -.:=;[]','') a,
         COLUMN b
  from TABLE)
where a is not null
order by a;

I used dump with the 1016 variant to give out the hex characters I wanted to replace which I could then user in a utl_raw.cast_to_varchar2.

Answer 6

I'm a bit late in answering this question, but had the same problem recently (people cut and paste all sorts of stuff into a string and we don't always know what it is). The following is a simple character whitelist approach:

SELECT est.clients_ref
  ,TRANSLATE (
              est.clients_ref
             ,   'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]:";<>?,./'
              || REPLACE (
                          TRANSLATE (
                                     est.clients_ref
                                    ,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]:";<>?,./'
                                    ,'~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'
                                    )
                         ,'~'
                         )
             ,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]:";<>?,./'
             )
      clean_ref

FROM edms_staging_table est