@ninjawedding That's not the only freaky thing about Oracle charsets:> "The Oracle database uses CESU-8 for its "UTF8" character set. Standard UTF-8 can be obtained using the character set "AL32UTF8" (since Oracle version 9.0)."http://en.qrwp.org/CESU-8 CESU-8 is UTF-8-with-surrogate-pairs.