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Unicode curiosity

Scott SwankJan 15 2026

Morning folks.

We have a customer address that contains, “Parcelación”. That 2nd to last letter looks like extended latin, specifically \00F3 a lowercase “o” with an accent acute. However, it is not. If I look at the characters, here's what I see for it:

`cross apply (`  
   `select substr(a.addr1,level,1) c,`  
       `ascii(substr(a.addr1,level,1))  u,`  
       `rawtohex(substr(a.addr1,level,1)) r,`  
       `decompose(substr(a.addr1,level,1)) d,`  
       `rawtohex(decompose(substr(a.addr1,level,1))) rd`  
   `from dual`  
   `connect by level <= length(a.addr1)`  

) chars

ascii() = 50099 – I can't make any sense of this value

rawtohex = C3B3 – This is not at all in the latin range for utf8

rawtohex(decompose()) = 6FCC81 – At least this is starting to make sense 6F is “o”, our base character. But diacritics should be in the range \0300-\036F. However, \CC81 is a chinese character.

So, can anyone make heads or tails of this mystery character's encoding? What on earth is that CC81? I'm beyond my depth in unicode.

Cheers, Scott

This post has been answered by mathguy on Jan 15 2026
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Added on Jan 15 2026
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