Ruby cannot see the NLS_LANG environment variable

Question

I run ruby script on CentOS and installed ruby via rvm (1.9.3).

I set the NLS_LANG variable to .bash_profile.

[app@box stasis]$ echo $NLS_LANG
en_US.UTF-8
[app@box stasis]$ which ruby
~/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/ruby

However, trying to access it through ruby (which the oci8 driver does), it cannot find it:

 1.9.3-p194 :001 > ENV['NLS_LANG']
 => nil

Access to other vars seems to work:

 1.9.3-p194 :004 > ENV['USER']
 => "app"

My script shows the following: Warning: NLS_LANG is not set. fallback to US7ASCII.

Thing: I run sqlplus from a ruby script (to execute some .sql files), and special characters are all messed up.

How can I get a ruby to see the value?

+5

robertrv May 11 '12 at 20:50

1 answer

mpapis · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-11T21:43:30+0000

You need to export the variables so that they are available in any application launches (unless they are functions):

export NLS_LANG

or together with the setting:

export NLS_LANG=en_US.UTF-8

or as in most systems LANGshould be available:

export NLS_LANG=$LANG