|Oracle® Database SQL Reference
10g Release 1 (10.1)
Part Number B10759-01
UNISTR takes as its argument a text string and returns it in the national character set. The national character set of the database can be either AL16UTF16 or UTF8.
UNISTR provides support for Unicode string literals by letting you specify the Unicode encoding value of characters in the string. This is useful, for example, for inserting data into
The Unicode encoding value has the form '\xxxx' where 'xxxx' is the hexadecimal value of a character in UCS-2 encoding format. To include the backslash in the string itself, precede it with another backslash (\\).
For portability and data preservation, Oracle recommends that in the
UNISTR string argument you specify only ASCII characters and the Unicode encoding values.
See Also:Oracle Database Globalization Support Guide for information on Unicode and national character sets
The following example passes both ASCII characters and Unicode encoding values to the
UNISTR function, which returns the string in the national character set:
SELECT UNISTR('abc\00e5\00f1\00f6') FROM DUAL; UNISTR ------ abcåñö