restoring to wrong encoding db

I was just copying a database that was in UNICODE encoding into a new
db for some testing. I hand't realized it was UNICODE and when it hit
some funky chinese data (from some spam that came in...) it errored
out with a string too long for a varchar(255).

The dump was created on PG 7.4.3 with "pg_dump -Fc"

The db was created with "createdb rt3"

The restore was to PG 7.4.5 with "pg_restore --verbose -d rt3 rt3.dump"

Is there some way for the dump to notice that the encoding is wrong in
the db into which it is being restored? Once I created the rt3 db
with encoding='UNICODE' it worked just fine. Should there be some
kind of check like that?

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Vivek Khera, Ph.D. Khera Communications, Inc.
Internet: khera(at)kciLink(dot)com Rockville, MD +1-301-869-4449 x806
AIM: vivekkhera Y!: vivek_khera http://www.khera.org/~vivek/