Thread: How to support German, French and other characters.

Hi Ivo,

If I use UNICODE encoding for the DB I get some errors:
For example the following query: select lower('MöBÜEL')
returns ERROR:  Unicode characters greater than or equal to 0x10000 are not
supported.

I found this on a forum:
----------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------
    > postgres 7.4 on linux, glibc 2.2.4-6

    > I've a table containing unicode-data and the lower()-function does not
    > work proper. While it lowers standard letters like A->a,B->b ... it
    > fails on special letters like german umlauts (Ä , Ö ...) that are
simply
    > keeped untouched.

    upper() and lower() didn't support multibyte character sets before 8.0.

    regards, tom lane
----------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------

We are using these king of comparations and character translations in our
DB.

I really cannot figure out what solution to use.

Best regards,
Andy.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Ivo Rossacher" <rossacher@bluewin.ch>
To: "Andrei Bintintan" <klodoma@ar-sd.net>
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 9:57 PM
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] How to support German, French and other characters.


> Dear Andy,
>
> ASCII encoding means that the database does not care (and know) about the
> encoding. So the client is in full charge to deal with the encoding issue.
> This is very uncomfortable within a multilanguage enviroment. Without the
> encoding the caption can not be determined correctly by the database it
self.
> Suse 9.1 does use unicode as the default encoding for all the desctop. For
my
> multilanguage projects I do use therefore UNICODE as encoding for the
> database. (createdb -EUNICODE dbname will generate a unicode database more
> precisly a UTF8 database)
> Most of the Microsoft clients are internal UNICODE anyway and can deal
with
> this setting. Older Unix or Linux installations need some tweaking
probably.
>
> Best regards
> Ivo Rossacher
>
> Am Mittwoch, 10. November 2004 09.59 schrieben Sie:
> > Hi to all,
> >
> > We are using pgsql as a "multilanguage" database. But I noticed
yesterday a
> > strange problem with the german umlaut characters. I cannot convert the
in
> > upper case in lowercase. Probably there are also other bad
functionalities.
> >
> > Now. I searched the internet for answers but they were not quite exact,
so
> > I could't find a solution.
> >
> > We use ASCII encoding for the database, but I tried the Latin1 -> Latin
10
> > and the behavior is the same. In some forums there is written something
> > about some "locale" setting... etc etc.
> >
> > What settings do I have to make so that we won't have these problems in
the
> > future. We intend to work with French characters also, and in the future
> > with Hungarian.
> >
> > As system the pgsql is v.7.4 running on a Suse 9.1 machine. The locale
> > command gives me:
> >
> > linz:/var/lib/pgsql/data # locale
> > LANG=
> > LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
> > LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
> > LC_TIME="POSIX"
> > LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
> > LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
> > LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
> > LC_PAPER="POSIX"
> > LC_NAME="POSIX"
> > LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
> > LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
> > LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
> > LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
> > LC_ALL=
> >
> >
> > Thank you in advance.
> > Andy.
>
> --
> Ivo Rossacher
>