Hi Tom

I have a column called position that contains some special character, but I cant work out what it is.

When I use sqlplus to query the column, the value appears as a '?'
When I use Toad is appears as a '-'

The problem is it is causing an excel report that I create using SYLK to fail with ora-6502 character buffer string too small.

I'd like to be able to print out the ascii value of each character (or just the special character) from that column.

I'm not so great at sql, but I think I would use a combination of ascii and instr in some loop for the length of the value in the column?

Many thanks

Neil

ops$tkyte%ORA11GR2> select username, dump(username) d from all_users where rownum = 1;

USERNAME                       D
------------------------------ ----------------------------------------
SYS                            Typ=1 Len=3: 83,89,83