> I don't quite follow that...the whole point of utf8 encoded database
> is so that you can use text functions and operators without the bytea
> treatment. As long as your client encoding is set up properly (so
> that data coming in and out is computed to utf8), then you should be
> ok. Dropping to ascii is usually not the solution. Your data
> inputting application should set the client encoding properly and
> coerce data into the unicode text type...it's really the only
> solution.
>
Email does not always follow a specific character set. I have tried
converting the data that comes in to utf-8 and it does not always work.
We receive Hebrew emails which come in mostly 2 flavors, UTF-8 and
windows-1255. Unfortunately, they are not compatible with one another.
SQL-ASCII and ASCII are different as someone on the list pointed out to
me. According to the documentation, SQL-ASCII makes no assumption about
encoding, so you can throw in any encoding you want.