One customer reported a not-correctly displayed Euro Symbol (€) in the database from sqlplus (msdos).

Why?

First, the character set did not support it.

select * from v$nls_parameters where PARAMETER like '%CHARACTERSET%';

PARAMETER                      VALUE
------------------------------ ---------------
NLS_CHARACTERSET               WE8ISO8859P1
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET         AL16UTF16

If you are still using WE8ISO8859P1, consider migrating to WE8MSWIN1252 using csalter

sqlplus "/ as sysdba" @?/rdbms/admin/csminst
csscan "'sys/sys as sysdba'" full=y tochar=we8mswin1252 array=1024000 process=5
sqlplus "/ as sysdba" @?/rdbms/admin/csalter.plb

It is not always that straight forward, check output from csscan (scan.*) carefully before running csalter.

Ok, now retry

H:\>set NLS_LANG=american_america.we8pc850

H:\>sqlplus.exe scott/tiger

SQL*Plus: Release 11.1.0.6.0 - Production on Thu May 10 11:28:01 2012

Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

SQL> select chr(128) from dual;

C
-
■

Not good!

Obviously, the PC850 client character is not good enough. Let’s switch to mswin1252 on the client.

H:\>chcp 1252
Active code page: 1252

H:\>set NLS_LANG=american_america.we8mswin1252

H:\>sqlplus.exe scott/tiger

Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

SQL> select chr(128) from dual;

C
-
Ç

Well, what’s missing now? The font ! Let’s change it from “Raster Fonts” to “Lucida Console”. Either by clicking on the command com properties, or even dynamically with that gem (tested on XP) !

H:\>type Lucida.cs
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

public class Lucida
{
  const int STD_OUT_HANDLE = -11;

  [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
  static extern int SetConsoleFont(IntPtr hOut, uint dwFontSize);

  [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
  static extern IntPtr GetStdHandle(int dwType);

  public static void Main()
  {
    SetConsoleFont(GetStdHandle(STD_OUT_HANDLE), 6);
  }
}

H:\>csc Lucida.cs
Microsoft (R) Visual C# 2010 Compiler version 4.0.30319.1
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
H:\>Lucida

H:\>sqlplus.exe scott/tiger

Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

SQL> select chr(128) from dual;

C
-
€