in reply to Solved: Preserving UTF-8 characters in Oracle and XML
I don't think you need ora_charset and NLS_LANG setting - one or the other will do. Also, be careful with ora_charset if you make more than one connection and expect to use different client charsets on each one as by default charsets are per environment and by default DBD::Oracle only creates one environment handle (see ora_envhp).
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