View Unicode data using Oracle SQL*Plus in Unix

Problem:

Unicode data is not showing from SQL*Plus properly. In the following example € sign showing as ?

[username@servername ~]$ sqlplus username@test_db

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.3.0 Production on Tue Nov 15 15:29:50 2016

Enter password:

Connected to:

Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production

With the Partitioning, Automatic Storage Management, OLAP, Data Mining

and Real Application Testing options

Session altered.

SQL> select content from transaction_data where TRANSACTIONID=30902132187;

CONTENT

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cout : 8,00?.

Solution

Change Putty Setting:

If you are using Putty, your Putty session needs it's Translation setting to be changed to UTF-8 before it can be displayed correctly.

Set the NLS_LANG parameter correctly:

[username@servername ~]$ export NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8