[cx-oracle-users] strange character encoding problems

[Marcus E. <eg...@di...>]

I am not able to store characters of the latin-1 charset in my 
oracle-database. I've encoded them according to NLS_CHARACTERSET but 
that doesn't help.
I'm running Oracle 10g XE, Python 2.4.1 and cx_Oracle 4.1

Here is some sample code which shows the very strange results:


#!/usr/bin/python 

# -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*- 

import cx_Oracle

db = cx_Oracle.connect('TESTUSER/TESTPASSWORD@localhost')
c = db.cursor()

query = unicode("SELECT 'äöü' FROM dual", 'iso-8859-1')
charsets = ['iso-8859-1', 'cp1252', 'utf-8', 'utf-16']

c.execute('SELECT * FROM V$NLS_PARAMETERS')
for row in c:
     print row

for charset in charsets:
     try:
         c.execute(query.encode(charset))
     except cx_Oracle.Error, err:
         print err
     else:
         print charset, c.fetchone()[0]

c.close()
db.close()

=======================================================
OUTPUT:

python charsettest.py
('NLS_LANGUAGE', 'AMERICAN')
('NLS_TERRITORY', 'AMERICA')
('NLS_CURRENCY', '$')
('NLS_ISO_CURRENCY', 'AMERICA')
('NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS', '.,')
('NLS_CALENDAR', 'GREGORIAN')
('NLS_DATE_FORMAT', 'DD-MON-RR')
('NLS_DATE_LANGUAGE', 'AMERICAN')
('NLS_CHARACTERSET', 'WE8MSWIN1252')
('NLS_SORT', 'BINARY')
('NLS_TIME_FORMAT', 'HH.MI.SSXFF AM')
('NLS_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT', 'DD-MON-RR HH.MI.SSXFF AM')
('NLS_TIME_TZ_FORMAT', 'HH.MI.SSXFF AM TZR')
('NLS_TIMESTAMP_TZ_FORMAT', 'DD-MON-RR HH.MI.SSXFF AM TZR')
('NLS_DUAL_CURRENCY', '$')
('NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET', 'AL16UTF16')
('NLS_COMP', 'BINARY')
('NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS', 'BYTE')
('NLS_NCHAR_CONV_EXCP', 'FALSE')
iso-8859-1 ???
cp1252 ???
utf-8 ??????
ORA-00911: invalid character


As you can see either encoding returns only questionmarks.
Any thoughts about this?