Syntax

Purpose

COMPOSE takes as its argument a character value char and returns the result of applying the Unicode canonical composition, as described in the Unicode Standard definition D117, to it. If the character set of the argument is not one of the Unicode character sets, COMPOSE returns its argument unmodified.

COMPOSE does not directly return strings in any of the Unicode normalization forms. To get a string in the NFC form, first call DECOMPOSE with the CANONICAL setting and then COMPOSE . To get a string in the NFKC form, first call DECOMPOSE with the COMPATIBILITY setting and then COMPOSE .

char can be of any of the data types: CHAR, VARCHAR2, NCHAR, or NVARCHAR2. Other data types are allowed if they can be implicitly converted to VARCHAR2 or NVARCHAR2. The return value of COMPOSE is in the same character set as its argument.

CLOB and NCLOB values are supported through implicit conversion. If char is a character LOB value, then it is converted to a VARCHAR2 value before the COMPOSE operation. The operation will fail if the size of the LOB value exceeds the supported length of the VARCHAR2 in the particular execution environment.

Examples

The following example returns the o-umlaut code point:

SELECT COMPOSE( 'o' || UNISTR('\0308') )
  FROM DUAL; 

CO 
-- 
ö