Oracle XE 11.2 Export / Import Charset I created a database in oracle XE 11.2 that uses charset AL32UTF8 that I now want to export.

When I perform the export, the resulting data appears in WE8MSWIN1252 character set and AL16UTF16 NCHAR character set.

The server uses AL32UTF8 character set (possible charset conversion).

Why is the export from the database in a different charset than the database itself is using?
The export utility will use the NLS_LANG environment variable specified for the client session.  If all your data can be represented in the Windows-1252 character set, that shouldn't be an issue.  If you want to do the export using the AL32UTF8 character set, you'd need to set the NLS_LANG.  In Windows, that would be something like

c:\&gt; set nls_lang = american_america.al32utf8