Re: What's a good default encoding?

"Junaili Lie" <junaili(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I am wondering if somebody here can tell me the difference between
> UTF-8 and SQL-ASCII, whether there are any benefits of converting
> SQL-ASCII to UTF-8?

SQL_ASCII isn't really an encoding; it's more like a declaration of
ignorance. If the encoding is set to SQL_ASCII, the backend will store
any high-bit-on data you send it, and return it without any sort of
conversion.

If you are dealing with data beyond the 7-bit ASCII set, it's probably a
really bad idea to be using the SQL_ASCII setting, because the database
won't give you any help at all in checking for bad data or converting
between the encodings wanted by different client programs. There are a
few situations where this is what you want, but I think most people are
better off picking a specific encoding.

regards, tom lane