Oracle SQLPlus [Electronic resources] : The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition نسخه متنی

3.4 Working with PL/SQL

There's not much to say about executing PL/SQL
blocks via i SQL*Plus. You execute those in much
the same way as you execute statements. You do not need to include
the forward slash that command-line SQL*Plus requires following a
PL/SQL block, but you do need to be sure to include the semicolon
following PL/SQL's END keyword. As in command-line
SQL*Plus, you'll want to SET SERVEROUTPUT ON if your
PL/SQL block uses DBMS_OUTPUT to return results. Figure 3-11 demonstrates.

Figure 3-11 was created using
i SQL*Plus from Oracle Database
10 g with the default setting of PREFORMAT OFF.
Because the output is not the result of a query,
it's not in the form of an HTML table. Examine the
HTML source, and you'll see that
<br> tags separate the three lines of
output. Interestingly, if you SET MARKUP HTML PREFORMAT ON,
i SQL*Plus correctly omits the
<br> tags and incorrectly omits wrapping the
output in <pre> and
</pre> tags. Thus, with PREFORMAT ON, the
results from executing the block in Figure 3-11
would all run together on one line:

Line 1 Line 2 Line 3 PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

No doubt this behavior is a bug. It is present in Oracle Database
10 g Release 1, but I hope it will be fixed in a
later release. In the meantime, if you encounter difficulty with line
breaks in your DBMS_OUTPUT results, you may find that a SET MARKUP
HTML PREFORMAT OFF command fixes the
problem.