title: Handling UTF-8 characters in Oracle external tables
body: <p>I have an external table that reads from a fixed length file. The file is expected to contain special characters. In my case the word containing special character is "Göteborg". Because "ö" is a special character, looks like Oracle is considering it as 2 bytes. That causes the trouble. The subsequent fields in the files get shifted by 1 byte thereby messing up the data. Has anyone faced the issue before. So far we have tried the following solution:</p>
  
  <p>Changed the value of NLS_LANG to AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1<br>
  Tried Setting the Database Character set to UTF-8<br>
  Tried changing the NLS_LENGTH_SYMMANTIC to CHAR instead of BYTE using ALTER SYSTEM<br>
  Tried changing the External table characterset to: AL32UTF8<br>
  Tried changing the External table characterset to: UTF-8  </p>
  
  <p>Nothing works. 
  Other details include:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>File is UTF-8 encoded</li>
  <li>Operating System : RHEL</li>
  <li>Database: Oracle 11g</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Any thing else that I might be missing? Any help will be appreciated. Thanks!</p>