mixing charactersets

Hi, I have a script that needs to connect to two database. Unfortunately, one of them uses US7ASCII encoding (similar to LATIN1) and the other one uses UTF-8 encoding. Before I connect to the first one, I set these environment variables: putenv("NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.US7ASCII"); putenv("NLS_CHARACTERSET=US7ASCII"); and before I connect to the second one, I set these environment variables: putenv("NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8"); putenv("NLS_CHARACTERSET=UTF8"); I have noticed that once you have set the environment, it ignores (or seems to ignore anyway) the second one. I have tried to set the environment each time just before I connect and also just before I do a query, but that doesn't make a difference. If I don't set the characterset to US7ASCII before I retrieve data from the first database, I get garbage data from the query. If I don't set the characterset to UTF-8 before I store data to the second database, it stores garbage. How can I use those two databases in one script? Jos