Display
I have found very little SQL Developer documentation that discusses the product's handling of Unicode data. Here is what I have pieced together though. The SQL Developer (v1.5.4) manual page entitled "NLS Parameter Values in the SQL Developer Environment" says this about its NLS settings.
SQL Developer initially (after installation) uses parameter values that include the following:
NLS_LANG,"AMERICAN" NLS_TERR,"AMERICA" NLS_CHAR,"AL32UTF8" NLS_SORT,"BINARY" NLS_CAL,"GREGORIAN" NLS_DATE_LANG,"AMERICAN" NLS_DATE_FORM,"DD-MON-RR"
Given that there is no way to change SQL Developer's character set while it is running it seems safe to assume SQL Developer sessions always operate with an AL32UTF8 character set (UTF-8 encoding). Data from databases using different character sets will most likely be converted to AL32UTF8 before it is displayed in SQL Developer's Results tab.
Thus, no environment or application setup is required to display Unicode characters properly. It just works correctly right out of the box.
Export Files
When exporting data from the Results tab (Right-click / Export Data) the export file's encoding can be set by first clicking on the "Browse" button in the Export Data dialog
and then selecting an encoding from the "File Encoding" popup list.
The following table maps some of SQL Developer's encoding names to IANA standard encoding names.
| SQL Developer Encoding Name |
IANA Standard Encoding Name |
Byte Order Mark |
Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| cp850 |
cp850 | none |
|
| Cp1252 |
windows-1252 | none | |
| windows-1252 |
windows-1252 | none |
|
| UTF-8 |
UTF-8 |
none | |
| UTF8 | UTF-8 | none | do not confuse this with the Oracle database "UTF8" character set's encoding, which is CESU-8 |
| UTF-16 | UTF-16 | BE BOM | |
| UTF_16 | UTF-16 | BE BOM | |
| UTF-16LE | UTF-16LE | none | |
| UTF-16BE | UTF-16BE | none |
The default encoding used for export files can be set in the Tools / Preferences / Environment / Encoding popup list.
