Re: pg jdbc driver

Yes, I have the database encoding set to SQL_ASCII, which hasn't been a
problem with ColdFusion 5. As you say, the server has been blindly passing
the data back and forth.

However, when I tested the same data with ColdFusion MX (built on a Java
platform), I ran into problems. The french characters were either throwing
"Invalid character..." errors, or displaying as garbage. I'm guessing that
CFMX was trying to convert the characters from SQL_ASCII to something else
(UTF-8?) somewhere between the database and the web page.

I've managed to get CF5 installed on the new server for now, but I plan to
do some more testing with CFMX. Probably have to dump the database,
re-create with UNICODE encoding, and restore.

I suspected that the problem originated with encoding at the CFMX level,
but I wanted to cover all bases.

Thanks for the feedback.

Cheers... Dino

At 07:14 PM 08/08/2004 -0500, you wrote:

>On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Dino Nardini wrote:
>
> > [Could the JDBC driver be causing the problems I'm seeing with my
> > website after moving from ColdFusion with ODBC? ]
>
>Unlikely. A common problem people find when using PostgreSQL's JDBC
>driver is that they have setup their database with SQL_ASCII encoding
>which doesn't have any information on what high-bit characters actually
>represent. Many applications are OK with this and blindly pass data back
>and forth, but Java requires having correctly encoded data and the JDBC
>driver will error out with something like "Invalid character data was
>found..." You reported problems correctly displaying this data, not an
>error, so I doubt that is the issue.
>
>As I mentioned Java is (sometimes painfully) encoding aware. I'm not
>familar with ColdFusion, but you likely need to set the page encoding
>correctly for converting Java Strings into bytes. This can be
>accomplished in a number of ways, for example set globally via the
>file.encoding system property or on per page basis via methods in
>javax.servlet.ServletResponse such as setCharacterEncoding,
>setContentType, and setLocale.
>
>Kris Jurka

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