Spool file out of command window special characters

[jamesincoward]

Hi - I'm spooling a file out of the command window. The output file contains all kinds of crazy special characters, like every character is surrounded by "^@". There's got to be some kind of setting I can change somewhere to fix this, but I can't figure it out. The same output is fine out of my sql*plus window. Help! Thanks!

 

[Marco Kalter]

Can you let me know your PL/SQL Developer version? Can you also let me know if you are connected to a Unicode database?

 

[georgeS]

Same thing happens with me
PL/SQL Developer
Version 12.0.7.1837 (64 bit)
01.111562 - 1 user license
Service Contract: 01/02/2018
Windows 10 Build 14393

spool c:\downloads\test.txt
select sysdate from dual;
spool off

gives

SYSDATE
-----------
10/01/2018

What are these "" ???

 

[georgeS]

SQL> select * from nls_database_parameters;

PARAMETER VALUE
----------------------------------------------------
NLS_RDBMS_VERSION 12.1.0.2.0
NLS_NCHAR_CONV_EXCP FALSE
NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS BYTE
NLS_COMP BINARY
NLS_DUAL_CURRENCY $
NLS_TIMESTAMP_TZ_FORMAT DD-MON-RR HH.MI.SSXFF AM TZR
NLS_TIME_TZ_FORMAT HH.MI.SSXFF AM TZR
NLS_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT DD-MON-RR HH.MI.SSXFF AM
NLS_TIME_FORMAT HH.MI.SSXFF AM
NLS_SORT BINARY
NLS_DATE_LANGUAGE AMERICAN
NLS_DATE_FORMAT DD-MON-RR
NLS_CALENDAR GREGORIAN
NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS .,
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET AL16UTF16
NLS_CHARACTERSET AL32UTF8
NLS_ISO_CURRENCY AMERICA
NLS_CURRENCY $
NLS_TERRITORY AMERICA
NLS_LANGUAGE AMERICAN

 

[Marco Kalter]

This is a Unicode "Byte order mark" to indicate that the output file is in UTF-8 format:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark#UTF-8