You Asked

Hi Tom,
    This is in continuation of my question on how can I insert streams of characters 
coming from HTML form into a oracle database table CLOB column. 
    Actually I am passing some free flow text (series of characters say something like 
what I am writing in this question) from html form. When this column is passed into the 
procedure which inserts the record what should be the datatype and how can I insert this 
incoming text into a CLOB column. 
Regards

Bhavesh 

and we said...

If you are calling a stored procedure, VARCHAR2.

tkyte@TKYTE816> create table t ( x int, y clob );
Table created.

tkyte@TKYTE816>
tkyte@TKYTE816> create or replace procedure p( p_x in int, p_new_text in varchar2 )
  2  as
  3  begin
  4          insert into t values ( p_x, p_new_text );
  5  end;
  6  /

Procedure created.

tkyte@TKYTE816>
tkyte@TKYTE816> exec p(1, rpad('*',32000,'*') );

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

tkyte@TKYTE816> exec p(2, 'hello world' );

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

tkyte@TKYTE816>
tkyte@TKYTE816> select x, dbms_lob.getlength(y) from t;

         X DBMS_LOB.GETLENGTH(Y)
---------- ---------------------
         1                 32000
         2                    11

2 rows selected.


followup to the comments below about the 4000 characters...

The difference is I used a BIND VARIABLE in the above example.  PLSQL limits my bind 
variable to 32k.

In SQL, the limit is 4,000 characters.  Using straight SQL like that, without a bind 
variable, you'll be limited to 4,000 characters.

See

http://asktom.oracle.com/~tkyte/Misc/LargeStrings.html

for another example of this.

Followup to comment below...

In Oracle8.0, the behavior of PLSQL is different then in 8.1 (which is what I used in my 
example.

In Oracle8.0, you would code:

  1  create or replace procedure p( p_x in int, p_new_text in varchar2 )
  2  as
  3     l_clob clob;
  4  begin
  5     insert into t values ( p_x, empty_clob() ) returning y into l_clob;
  6     dbms_lob.write( l_clob, 1, length(p_new_text), p_new_text );
  7* end;