Finding and removing non ascii characters from an Oracle Varchar2

Question

We are currently migrating one of our oracle databases to UTF8 and we have found a few records that are near the 4000 byte varchar limit. When we try and migrate these reco

Answer 1

I'm a bit late in answering this question, but had the same problem recently (people cut and paste all sorts of stuff into a string and we don't always know what it is). The following is a simple character whitelist approach:

SELECT est.clients_ref
  ,TRANSLATE (
              est.clients_ref
             ,   'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]:";<>?,./'
              || REPLACE (
                          TRANSLATE (
                                     est.clients_ref
                                    ,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]:";<>?,./'
                                    ,'~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'
                                    )
                         ,'~'
                         )
             ,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]:";<>?,./'
             )
      clean_ref

FROM edms_staging_table est