php oracle and &aacute; " á "

jdc44

Here is a question I think is more Oracle than php, but I'll throw it out and hope for a hit.

I have a record in an Oracle database table. In a text field I have several characters, which I can view via the OEM, that are "á"s. ( If you cannot see a character in the quotes, it is an &aacute in html - an 'a' with a right pointing carrot on top. ) I believe these were originally bullets (<LI>) coming from a FoxPro Application going into the Oracle table on the backend. Maybe Oracle translated them into aacute looking characters. ??

When I use php to read in this record and display it on a web page, I need to change this character back to a Bullet or a <LI> character. My problem is my attempts are not working. Hmmm!

I thought that because I can see the character as an aacute, that the code would see it this way also. I've tried to filter for it using both the chr(225) value of the aacute and a copy-paste 'á'. Niether is working.

I've used preg_match('/á/', $textIn) and eregi_replace("á", $textIn) - not.

I've tried to use preg_match(chr(225), $textIn) or if( ord($textIn) == 225 ){...} and they do not work.

I did some php testing with a script that doesn't get this character from the Oracle table. I copied and pasted this character from the Oracle field into a php variable and my above filters work. Php sees this character as a chr(225), but when I read it in right from the Oracle table, it is as though it is not being seen as a chr(225).

So, my question is, does anyone have any other suggestions on what to filter for - for this aacute (looking) character?

Thanks for any suggestions.

mourisj

Hello,

A couple of questions:

Did you change the OS (Windows to Unix ...) when migrating from Foxpro to Oracle ?
Did you check the NLS-Settings of your Oracle DB? We once had corrupted characters when migrating an Oracle DB from Windows to Unix because of wrong NLS-settings or character-sets
If you are able to identify the character with PHP, don't you have the possibility to update this character?
What field-type is it in? You cannot do a lookup in fields of type "LONG" on Oracle:
select * from tablename where LONGTYPEFIELD like '%á%'
will not work! You can copy the text of the field in some tool (e.g.TOAD), modify it and do an update to change the values in these fields. There are ways to extract the data row by row into variables and search the variables, but I can't help you on this (Perhaps I have a little doc about it, but I have to search my archives)

HTH

JJ Mouris