NLS_CHARACTERSET WE8ISO8859P1 and UTF8 issues in Oracle

Question

I am currently using a Database in oracle which has NLS_CHARACTERSET WE8ISO8859P1 so lets say I store a value in varchar2 field which is maž (accented character) so in datab

Answer 1

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14225/ch2charset.htm#g1009784

Oracle Character Set Name: WE8ISO8859P1
Description: Western European 8-bit ISO 8859 Part 1
Region: WE (Western Europe)
Number of Bits Used to Represent a Character: 8

On the other hand, UTF-8 uses several bytes to store a symbol.

If your database uses WE8ISO8859P1 and the column type is from VARCHAR group (not NVARCHAR) and you're inserting a symbol which code > 255, this symbol will be transformed to WE8ISO8859P1 and some information will be lost.

To put it simply, if you're inserting UTF-8 into a db with single-byte character set, your data is lost.

The link above describes different scenarios how to tackle this issue.

You can also try Oracle asciistr/unistr functions, but in general it's not a good way to deal with such problems.