cx_Oracle and unicode data

[looping]

Hi,

I need to get data from an Oracle DB that contains unicode data
(chinese text).
But the chinese data that I receive is wrong (only ¿).
After a look at the Oracle documentation I've found an environment
variable called NLS_LANG that you could set to define what charset the
DB client use and it work fine.

But it's not what I call a 'clean' solution and I suppose that it must
exist another way to force the client DB to use UTF8, or another
solution to get my data.
Could someone help me ?
Thanks.

Example:

# -*- coding: latin1 -*-
import os
import cx_Oracle

os.environ["NLS_LANG"] = ".UTF8"

con = cx_Oracle.connect("demo/demo at DEMOUTF8A")
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("select DESCRIPTION from DEC_DESCRIPTION where
DEC_DESCRIPTION_ID = 1792528")
val1 = cur.fetchone()[6]
val2 = cur.fetchone()[6]
print con.encoding, con.nencoding, con.maxBytesPerCharacter
cur.close()
print val1.decode(con.encoding)
print val2.decode(con.encoding)

del os.environ["NLS_LANG"]


>>>
UTF-8 UTF-8 3
珀マザーボードのテスト作業 颇マザーボードのテスト作業マザーボードのテスト作業,

without NLS_LANG setting I get:
>>>
WINDOWS-1252 WINDOWS-1252 1
¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿,