Re: Encoding Issue with UNICODE

daniel(at)manitou-mail(dot)org ("Daniel Verite") wrote in message news:<20050411035003(dot)3592776(at)localhost>...
> Fritz Bayer wrote:
>
> > I have a java program, which writes words containing german umlauts
> > like äöü into the database. As you probably know, those characters
> > belong to the ISO-8859-1 character encoding set.
> >
> > In my java webapplication those umlauts (äöü) get displayed correctly.
> > So they actually get stored correctly in the database.
> >
> > However, when I use postgresql's psql client I those characters get
> > displayed incorretly.
> >
> > For example the city name "münchen" gets displayed as "mÃ?nchen". Not
> > so in my webapplication. There the city name in the HTML code appears
> > corretly as "münchen".
> >
> > So why is psql not displaying the unicode characters correclty? Or
> > could it be that my xterm can not handle unicode characters?
>
> From your description it really looks like the latter. You can issue
> \encoding latin1
> inside psql
>

Thanks for you help. Now I undestand. It's true somehow my terminal
does not handle unicode characters.

After I entered "\encoding latin1" as you suggested everything works
fine. So the answer is that without that unicode characters get
displayed.

But in which encoding? I guess utf8 or utf16...

But why doesn that fail only for äüö? Shouldn't any other letter
encoded in utf16 also fail?

I mean unicode itself is 16 bit long. So "münchen" should expand to 14
characters. But only ü expands to two characters.

> or you can also set the PGCLIENTENCODING environment variable to latin1
> before launching psql on non-unicode aware terminals.
>
> > Can somebody help me out here? Should I create the databases as LATIN1
> > instead of UNICODE? And how can I transform my current databases into
> > LATIN1 ones? They should be compatible, because all characters I use
> > are only äöü, which are downward compatible.
>
> But then you'll have trouble with your java app if you do that. Java works with
> unicode strings, so it makes sense to have the db contents in unicode as well.

No thats ok. Java communicates with psql using unicode only. That's
why it also worked...