Inserting French character into Oracle gets converted into some junk characters

Question

Using PL/SQL Developer, I'm able to insert French character in my Oracle database without any error.

Querying:

SELECT * FROM nls_database_parameters WHERE parameter = 'NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET';

Output: AL16UTF16

But when i retreive the data using select statement it get converted into some junk characters, For eg:

système gets converted to système and so on....

Any suggestion/workaround will be appreciated.

Answer 1

The issue was due to different values in NLS_LANGUAGE at client and server.

At server it was: AMERICAN use following query to read the parameters:

SELECT * FROM nls_database_parameters

At client it was: AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8MSWIN1252

In PL/SQL Developer Help->About, click on Additional Info button and scroll down.

What i observed other thing, while trying to fix the issue: The characters were not converting to junk characters in first update. But when i retreive them(which contains non-ascii characters) and update again, then they are converting to junk characters.