Unable to create directory in oracle 12c

Question

I am using Oracle 12.2 .I wish to import data pump files. To do that, I wish to create a directory, containing the files and then import. I use the following command to create directory

CREATE DIRECTORY dpump_dir1 AS  ‘D:\dumpdir’;

I am getting the error as

SQL Error: ORA-00911: invalid character 00911. 00000 - "invalid character" *Cause: identifiers may not start with any ASCII character other than letters and numbers. $#_ are also allowed after the first character. Identifiers enclosed by doublequotes may contain any character other than a doublequote. Alternative quotes (q'#...#') cannot use spaces, tabs, or carriage returns as delimiters. For all other contexts, consult the SQL Language Reference Manual. Could anybody tell me what is going wrong?

Answer 1

The quotes being used in the code you provided are not simple straight single quotes; it's slightly easier to see when formatted as code:

CREATE DIRECTORY dpump_dir1 AS  ‘D:\dumpdir’;

You can also use your text editor or dump the string to see which chraacters it contains:

select dump(q'[CREATE DIRECTORY dpump_dir1 AS  ‘D:\dumpdir’;]', 1016) from dual;

DUMP(Q'[CREATEDIRECTORYDPUMP_DIR1AS‘D:\DUMPDIR’;]',1016)                                                                                                                               
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Typ=96 Len=49 CharacterSet=AL32UTF8: 43,52,45,41,54,45,20,44,49,52,45,43,54,4f,52,59,20,64,70,75,6d,70,5f,64,69,72,31,20,41,53,20,20,e2,80,98,44,3a,5c,64,75,6d,70,64,69,72,e2,80,99,3b

You can see that it's reported at 49 bytes despite being 45 characters long, indicating you have multibyte characters. Before the final semicolon , which is shown as 3b , you have the sequence e2,80,99 which represents the ' right single quotation mark , and a bit earlier you have the sequence e2,80,98 which represents the ' left single quotation mark .

If you use plain quotes it should work:

CREATE DIRECTORY dpump_dir1 AS  'D:\dumpdir';

Presumably you copied and pasted the text from an editor which helpfully substituted curly quotes.