Steve T <stevetucknott(at)yahoo(dot)co(dot)uk> writes:
> Is there an official way for migrating database encodings?
Not via pg_dumpall. If you dump the databases individually,
then you can create them manually on the target installation
with whatever encoding (or other properties) you want,
finishing by restoring the per-DB dumps into the respective
new databases.
Another way is to manually edit the pg_dumpall output
script and change the encoding options in the CREATE
DATABASE commands (but NOT the "SET client_encoding"
commands).
regards, tom lane