Thread: Problems getting german settings to work correctly

Today i tried to finally get german settings to work correctly on my
system.
I think I did everything according to the information in the docs, but
it does not work. Hopefully someone has gone thru the same procedure and
can tell me what I did wrong.

I downloaded pg722, compiled and installed

The compile options where:

configure --prefix=/usr/local/pgsql2 --enable-locale
--enable-multibyte=UNICODE

I initialized the db-cluster with initdb. The env settings at that time
where

export LANG=de_DE
export LC_ALL=de_DE

After that I started the postmaster.

I checked for the settings with pg_controldata

bash-2.05a$ ./pg_controldata
pg_control version number:            71
Catalog version number:               200201121
Database state:                       IN_PRODUCTION
pg_control last modified:             Wed Oct  2 16:57:52 2002
Current log file id:                  0
Next log file segment:                1
Latest checkpoint location:           0/1367C0
Prior checkpoint location:            0/109664
Latest checkpoint's REDO location:    0/1367C0
Latest checkpoint's UNDO location:    0/0
Latest checkpoint's StartUpID:        8
Latest checkpoint's NextXID:          137
Latest checkpoint's NextOID:          24748
Time of latest checkpoint:            Wed Oct  2 16:57:50 2002
Database block size:                  8192
Blocks per segment of large relation: 131072
LC_COLLATE:                           de_DE
LC_CTYPE:                             de_DE

Then I created a test database with 2 test tables.

                 Table "test1"
 Column |           Type           | Modifiers
--------+--------------------------+-----------
 int1   | integer                  | not null
 date1  | timestamp with time zone |
Primary key: test1_pkey

I inserted a test entry in test1 and tried to query from it.

test=# select to_char(date1, 'DAY') from test1;
  to_char
-----------
 WEDNESDAY

I had hoped that with german settings this would be "MITTWOCH".

----------------------------------------------------------------

I created a second table to check for sorting. For this I changed the
encoding to LATIN1 and inserted several strings into the test table.

                Table "test2"
  Column  |         Type          | Modifiers
----------+-----------------------+-----------
 int1     | integer               | not null
 str_test | character varying(30) |
Primary key: test2_pkey

test=# select * from test2 order by str_test;
 int1 | str_test
------+----------
   10 | üüü
    1 | aaa
    2 | aAA
    3 | AAA
   14 | ööö
   13 | äää
   12 | ÄÄÄ
   15 | ÖÖÖ
   11 | ÜÜÜ
   16 | ßßß
   18 | bbb
   17 | BBB
   19 | ccc
   21 | CCC
   20 | DDD
    9 | mmm
    8 | MMM
    4 | zzz
    5 | zzZ
    6 | zZZ
    7 | ZZZ

This does not look right too.

I would be very happy about any hints to improve the situation.

Many TIA,

peter

I tried to use LATIN1 for the database encoding, now the sorting of the
umlauts is working. I do not know a lot about encodings and localization
so that might be a dumb question, but: Isn't it possible to use UNICODE
encoding and get localized sorting?

Nethertheless i never managed to get a german output for that:

test=# select to_char(now(),'DAY');
  to_char
-----------
 FRIDAY
(1 Zeile)

I might mention that german sorting and output in unix commands like
"sort" and "date" is working ok.

Ciao, peter