> >>> Thus I would be happy if getdatabaseencoding() returned 'UNKNOWN' or
> >>> something similar when in fact it doesn't know what the encoding is
> >>> (i.e. when not compiled with multibyte).
> >>
> >
> > Is that ok for Java? I thought Java needs to know the encoding
> > beforehand so that it could convert to/from Unicode.
>
> That is actually the original issue that started this thread. If you
> want the full thread see the jdbc mail archive list. A user was
> complaining that when running on a database without multibyte enabled,
> that through psql he could insert and retrieve 8bit characters, but in
> jdbc the 8bit characters were converted to ?'s.
Still I don't see what you are wanting in the JDBC driver if
PostgreSQL would return "UNKNOWN" indicating that the backend is not
compiled with MULTIBYTE. Do you want exact the same behavior as prior
7.1 driver? i.e. reading data from the PostgreSQL backend, assume its
encoding default to the Java client (that is set by locale or
something else) and convert it to UTF-8. If so, that would make sense
to me...
--
Tatsuo Ishii