Re: UTF8 with BOM support in psql

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Eisentraut [mailto:peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 9:05 AM
> To: Chuck McDevitt
> Cc: Itagaki Takahiro; pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: Re: [HACKERS] UTF8 with BOM support in psql
>
> On tis, 2009-11-17 at 00:59 -0800, Chuck McDevitt wrote:
> > Or is there a plan to read and convert the UTF-16 or UTF-32 to UTF-8,
> > so psql and PostgreSQL understand it?
> > (BTW, that would actually be nice on Windows, where UTF-16 is common).
>
> Well, someone could implement UTF-16 or UTF-whatever as client encoding.
> But I have not heard of any concrete proposals about that.

Certainly that would be nice, given that UTF-16 is the "native" encoding for Java, C#, Visual Basic.net, JDBC, ODBC drivers >= ver 3.5, Microsoft Windows (all system calls use UTF-16, with a compatibility layer for old apps), and apps that Postgres users might switch from, such as MS SQLServer.

But for the short term, a warning or error saying we don't support it is better than a confusing lexer error or syntax error.