SQL & PL/SQL

RPAD function was providing incorrect result given the column contained some Unicode characters...
I believe that the issue is caused by the fact that COLUMN NAME is stored as VARCHAR and as such RPAD expects 1 byte per character thus incorrectly counting the length when encountering the Unicode character that takes 2 bytes.

My solution is to use TO_NCHAR conversion while using the RPAD so it knows to count the characters using UTF-8 encoding, i.e.

RPAD(TO_NCHAR(Columnname, 60))