Re: Special charaters

Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > > > This happens when I import csv file via my app into postgres.
> > > > The csv file has some “hello” from microsoft word 2003.
> > > > In postgres it appears as hello
> > > >
> > > > Could somebody help on this?
> > >
> > > Check your encodings.
> >
> > I doubt that's it, but I've been wrong before... I say, Google for
> > "smart quotes" and... good luck. (They don't belong to any encoding.)
>
> Well, they must exist at least on utf8, otherwise they couldn't have
> been pasted in the original message.

To be more precise, the two characters in question are UNICODE 201C and
201D. They exist only in UNICODE and Windows encodings.

Concerning the original problem:

- Figure out what the encoding of the CSV-File is. If the quotes are
one byte wide, it is a windows encoding, otherwise something UNICODE.
- Set the environment variable PGCLIENTENCODING to the value that belongs
to this encoding. There's a list in the documentation:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/multibyte.html
- Make sure that the database is UTF-8.

Then e.g. import via psql's \copy should work fine.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe