Thread: iso-8859-1 and utf-8
Hi. I found out by accident that my db-dump, at least in ver. 8.3.3, automagically converts from iso-8859-1 to utf-8. Our db has been around since January 2000 and iso-8859-1 was chosen back then as encoding. When I occasionally imported the nightly dump to a test-db it would complain very early during the import and abort if the encoding was incorrect. I think this was also the case with 8.3.1 although I'm not certain. Yesterday I did another import on my test-db and this was created with utf-8 as encoding. The import did not complain and I ended up with an utf-8-db which is what we have aimed at in the near future. Our web had some iso-8859-1-quirks which we have solved. I've started to plan a migration to utf-8. I assume it requires a complete db-dump, delete the iso-8859-1-db, create an utf-8-db and do an import. Previously I had piped the dump through iconv to convert but this does not seem to be a requirement any longer. -- regards Claus When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner. Shakespeare
On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 1:59 AM, Claus Guttesen <kometen@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi. > > I found out by accident that my db-dump, at least in ver. 8.3.3, > automagically converts from iso-8859-1 to utf-8. Our db has been > around since January 2000 and iso-8859-1 was chosen back then as > encoding. When I occasionally imported the nightly dump to a test-db > it would complain very early during the import and abort if the > encoding was incorrect. I think this was also the case with 8.3.1 > although I'm not certain. I'm guessing that the client encoding is set to utf-8 instead of iso-8859-1 on the client end. pg automatically converts to the client encoding of the user connecting / environment. I know that at least 8.2 supports the -E switch to set client encoding. psql --help MUCH SNIPPED: -E, --encoding=ENCODING dump the data in encoding ENCODING