Re: Character Decoding Problems

Evan,

Can you provide a test case to demonstrate your problem. Many people
are using the driver sucessfully with non-english characters. So I
don't think the problem is as you describe it.

thanks,
--Barry

Evan Tsue wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been having problems decoding non-Latin characters using the
> Postgres JDBC driver. Here's the situation: I'm using postgres 7.3.2
> and I've created a test database using 'createdb -E UNICODE testdb' to
> ensure that I really am using the UNICODE character set. Using psql, I
> created a table using the following command: 'CREATE TABLE messages
> (message_uid SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, message_text VARCHAR(255))' to test
> character encoding and decoding. At that point, I inserted a message
> that was in English. I also inserted a message that was in Arabic. I
> did a select on that table using psql and the values came back perfectly
> (I'm using MacOS X, so the characters are displayed correctly).
> Next, I did a select on the same table via JDBC. All I had the
> program do was select on the table and print the results out to standard
> output. The message in English was displayed perfectly. However, the
> message that was in Arabic was displayed as a series of question marks
> and spaces.
> I eventually navigated my way through the JDBC driver source to find
> that the problem is in the decodeUTF8 method in the
> org.postgresql.core.Encoding class. Apparently, it doesn't seem to be
> working properly for non-Western characters. I replaced the call to
> that method with a call to the java.lang.String constructor and now
> everything works perfectly.
> In addition to Arabic, I took a random sample of Chinese, Japanese,
> Russian and Korean text and inserted it into the database. Using the
> original driver, I get the question marks. But, when I used the String
> constructor, everything comes out fine.
> Could someone please either fix the Encoding.decodeUTF8 method or
> replace the call to that with a call to the String constructor?
>
> Thanks,
> Evan
>
>
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