[quote]Originally posted by Marco Kalter:
This may actually be caused by client/server character set conversion. Can you let me know if your client and server character set are indeed different? If so, can you also confirm that this problem goes away if you make the client character set the same as the server? [/quote]Yes, agreed.

SQL> select value from nls_database_parameters where parameter = 'NLS_CHARACTERSET';

VALUE
---------------
AL32UTF8


I'm using "instant client":

Using
Home:
DLL: C:\Program Files\oracle\instantclient\instantclient_10_2\oci.dll
OCI: version 9.2
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.3.0
Character size: 4 byte(s)

I read it defaults to NLS_LANG-encoding US7ASCII

Do you know how to change the client character set ?

thanks