How to support German, French and other characters.

Hi to all,

We are using pgsql as a "multilanguage" database. But I noticed yesterday a strange problem with the german umlaut characters. I cannot convert the in upper case in lowercase. Probably there are also other bad functionalities.

Now. I searched the internet for answers but they were not quite exact, so I could't find a solution.

We use ASCII encoding for the database, but I tried the Latin1 -> Latin 10 and the behavior is the same. In some forums there is written something about some "locale" setting... etc etc.

What settings do I have to make so that we won't have these problems in the future. We intend to work with French characters also, and in the future with Hungarian.

As system the pgsql is v.7.4 running on a Suse 9.1 machine. The locale command gives me:

linz:/var/lib/pgsql/data # locale
LANG=
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=

Thank you in advance.
Andy.