Hi,
I've been having problems decoding non-Latin characters using the
Postgres JDBC driver. Here's the situation: I'm using postgres 7.3.2
and I've created a test database using 'createdb -E UNICODE testdb' to
ensure that I really am using the UNICODE character set. Using psql, I
created a table using the following command: 'CREATE TABLE messages
(message_uid SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, message_text VARCHAR(255))' to test
character encoding and decoding. At that point, I inserted a message
that was in English. I also inserted a message that was in Arabic. I
did a select on that table using psql and the values came back
perfectly (I'm using MacOS X, so the characters are displayed
correctly).
Next, I did a select on the same table via JDBC. All I had the
program do was select on the table and print the results out to
standard output. The message in English was displayed perfectly.
However, the message that was in Arabic was displayed as a series of
question marks and spaces.
I eventually navigated my way through the JDBC driver source to find
that the problem is in the decodeUTF8 method in the
org.postgresql.core.Encoding class. Apparently, it doesn't seem to be
working properly for non-Western characters. I replaced the call to
that method with a call to the java.lang.String constructor and now
everything works perfectly.
In addition to Arabic, I took a random sample of Chinese, Japanese,
Russian and Korean text and inserted it into the database. Using the
original driver, I get the question marks. But, when I used the String
constructor, everything comes out fine.
Could someone please either fix the Encoding.decodeUTF8 method or
replace the call to that with a call to the String constructor?
Thanks,
Evan
