Re: UTF8 national character data type support WIP patch and list of open issues.

From: "Tatsuo Ishii" <ishii(at)postgresql(dot)org>
> What about limiting to use NCHAR with a database which has same
> encoding or "compatible" encoding (on which the encoding conversion is
> defined)? This way, NCHAR text can be automatically converted from
> NCHAR to the database encoding in the server side thus we can treat
> NCHAR exactly same as CHAR afterward. I suppose what encoding is used
> for NCHAR should be defined in initdb time or creation of the database
> (if we allow this, we need to add a new column to know what encoding
> is used for NCHAR).
>
> For example, "CREATE TABLE t1(t NCHAR(10))" will succeed if NCHAR is
> UTF-8 and database encoding is UTF-8. Even succeed if NCHAR is
> SHIFT-JIS and database encoding is UTF-8 because there is a conversion
> between UTF-8 and SHIFT-JIS. However will not succeed if NCHAR is
> SHIFT-JIS and database encoding is ISO-8859-1 because there's no
> conversion between them.

Thanks for the idea, it sounds flexible for wider use. Your cooperation
would be much appreciated to devise implementation with as little code as
possible.

Regards
MauMau