Converting special character to plain text in oracle

Question

we are having a database with utf8 as charset. now in one table we are having a value like \'HERBES-Herbe à poux\' . now we have to convert it into \'HERBES-Herbe a poux\' . i.

Answer 1

What constitutes a "special character" to you? Anything outside the US7ASCII character set?

You can potentially use the CONVERT function

SELECT convert( <>, 'US7ASCII' )
  FROM table_name

Assuming that there is a mapping for the particular character to the US7ASCII character set, that mapping will be used to replace the character. If there is no mapping defined, the character will be replaced by the default replacement character, a question mark "?".