Character Sets and Encoding Schemes

Oracle supports not only 8-bit but also 7-bit schemes for single-byte character sets. It also supports fixed-width multibyte character sets as well as varying-width multibyte character sets.

An encoding scheme for a character set specifies the numeric codes that correspond to the characters that the computer or terminal can display and receive. These encoding schemes are used to interpret the data into symbols that are meaningful to the users reading the data from the terminal or the machine from which they are reading the characters.

To this end, Oracle offers different classes for encoding schemes, including single-byte schemes, varying-width multibyte schemes, and fixed-width multibyte schemes and Unicode ...

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