Re: Character Encoding Confusion

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Markus Wollny wrote:

> Hi!
>
> As ODBC seems to be blissfully unaware of any character encodings
> whatsoever, so were we - our databases are encoded in SQL_ASCII,
> although we have stored german special chars (ÄÖÜäöü and ß), and from
> what I have read so far, these are stored as multibyte and thus exceed
> the SQL-ASCII specification.
>
> With ODBC we never noticed the mistake we'd made. Now with
> JDBC/ColdFusion MX 6.1, we see all sorts of weird characters on our
> web-application, but not the ones which are stored in the database.
>
> I tried setting different character sets for the JDBC-driver, using the
> URL-syntax
> jdbc:postgresql://123.456.789.012:5432/database?charSet=characterSet
> with charSet=iso-8859-1 or charSet=UTF-8 for example, but that just
> change anything.
>
> Now is there some way to elegantly resolve the issue without dropping
> and recreating the databases in order to change the encoding? Can we
> somehow get the JDBC-driver to act just as the ODBC-driver did -
> silently passing on the "bad" characters without changing anything?
>

The JDBC driver needs the data encoded correctly, the ?charSet= option
only works on 7.2 and earlier databases because then multibyte was not
compiled in by default. This will require a dump and reload.

Kris Jurka