ORA-06502 when deinstalling apex supporting objects

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It took me a while to figure out why i was getting this strange error when attempting to deinstall the supporting objects of an Apex application:

ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: character string buffer too small

Unable to deinstall application.

I had the suspect there was something wrong with the statements being executed but after several attempts to understand which statement was the culprit, i turned to the application file dump to see if i could spot something in there.

Indeed this is what i found:

Highlighted in grey color you can see some junk characters at the beginning of the deinstallation script.
As the simple deinstallation script was assembled from copying and pasting ddl statements taken from a SQL Developer window, i imagine that, at some point, something must have gone wrong.

The tricky bit is in that neither from the apex editor nor from the deinstallation script preview page you spot anything strange, those characters are nowhere to be seen.

So, if you are getting the error above, check out the application file dump with a text editor!

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