title: Entering special characters fails in Oracle table
body: <p>I need to test if my application is reading special characters from the database and displaying them in exactly the same way. For this, I need to populate the database table with all special characters available. However, I am not sure how I can specify the special characters in the sql insert query. Can anyone please guide me to an example where I can insert a special character in the query? For simplicity sake, suppose the table is a City table with Area and Avg_Temperature being the 2 columns. If I need to insert the degree (celcius/farhenheit) symbol in Avg_Temperature column, how should I write the query? </p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>*<em>[Edit on 1/9/2012 at 2:50PM EST]</em>*As per Justin Cave's suggestion below, I did following analysis:</p>
  
  <p>Table: <code>create table city(area number, avg_temperature nvarchar2(10));</code></p>
  
  <p>Date: <code>insert into city values (1100, '10◦C');</code></p>
  
  <pre><code>Query:
  select dump(avg_temperature, 1010) from city where area = 1100;
  
  O/P
  DUMP(AVG_TEMPERATURE,1010)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
  ----------------------------------------------------------
  Typ=1 Len=8 CharacterSet=AL16UTF16: 0,49,0,48,0,191,0,67                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
  
  Query
  select value$ from sys.props$ where name='NLS_CHARACTERSET';
  
  O/P
  VALUE$
  ----------------
  WE8MSWIN1252
  
  Query:
  select value$ from sys.props$ where name='NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET';
  
  O/P
  ----------------
  AL16UTF16
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It seems that the insert does mess up the special characters as Justin Cave suggested. But I am not able to understand why this is happening? Can anyone please provide related suggestion?</p>