You need to check five things:

1. In what encoding is the data stored in the Sybase database?
2. Does your script Encode::decode the data from the proper encoding?
3. In what encoding is the data stored in the Oracle database?
4. Does your script Encode::encode the data to the proper encoding?
5. Does your script output to the console in the encoding that the console uses?

In Sybase Japanese data columns are encoded in Shift-JIS encoding.

We are retrieving this data using DBI.
use DBI qw(:sql_types);

 if ( @row = $dbFOX_sth->fetchrow_array ) {
                 ( $sInstrumentNameJ, $sInstrumentShortJ )    = @row;

When we print this data in unix console it comes as junk.

After we get this value in a variable we pass this to a stored proc which inserts data in Oracle Nvarchar2 data type field.

Here it comes as inverted ?.

Please advise.

I guess, we'll have to go step by step. First, add "use Encode;". After you've obtained the values from DB, check if they are converted to internal perl encoding using

print Encode::is_utf8($sInstrumentNameJ), "\n";
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If this produces "1", then the value is converted to perl's internal form and we should check how you output it to the terminal. If this produces empty string, then the value is not converted by the driver. In this case you have to convert it manually.

In either case, we have to know which locale is active in your terminal emulator. Normally, it shall be some UTF-8 locale, but who knows. Please provide output of "locale" command.

Also, if the "is_utf8" function produces empty string, it would be good to provide here the hexdump of the value you get from the database. Using this way for example

print unpack("H*", $sInstrumentNameJ), "\n";
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And also the Japanese text it should correspond to.

Please see points 2 to 5 of my reply.

If the charset is not set to utf8, and if the columns are not univarchar(), then you need to either have the client code (DBI/DBD::Sybase) use the utf8 charset when fetching the data, or use the same charset as the dataserver.

If the data is stored in univarchar() columns then you should set your client charset to utf8.

DBD::Sybase 1.12 should have better support for unicode/utf8 characters, btw.

Michael