Loading an Excel file using sqlldr and "corrupted" French characters

The issue: using as input file an Excel file, 1.csv , we load it using sqlldr utility to the database and when querying the newly inserted data, the French characters seem corrupted.

The control file used is as follows:

LOAD DATA
CHARACTERSET UTF8  ---------> solution provided by the developer :-)
infile '1.csv'
APPEND
INTO TABLE  my_table
fields terminated by "," optionally enclosed by '"'
TRAILING NULLCOLS
(empno,alert_end_Date date "mm/dd/yyyy",alert_text char(500000),alert_title,emp_no)

Solution: use CHARACTERSET WE8ISO8859P1 inside the control file, or just remove the characterset entry.

LOAD DATA

CHARACTERSET WE8ISO8859P1  ---------> this has to be the same as nls_lang of the DB , see note below

infile '1.csv'

APPEND

INTO TABLE  my_table

fields terminated by "," optionally enclosed by '"'

TRAILING NULLCOLS

(empno,alert_end_Date date "mm/dd/yyyy",alert_text char(500000),alert_title,emp_no)

 Note : to find out the NLS LANG of the DB:

 select DECODE(parameter, 'NLS_CHARACTERSET', 'CHARACTER SET',

'NLS_LANGUAGE', 'LANGUAGE',

'NLS_TERRITORY', 'TERRITORY') name,

value from v$nls_parameters

WHERE parameter IN ( 'NLS_CHARACTERSET', 'NLS_LANGUAGE', 'NLS_TERRITORY')

/

NAME VALUE

————- —————–

LANGUAGE AMERICAN

TERRITORY AMERICA

CHARACTER SET WE8ISO8859P1