Thread: change db encoding?
hi, for historical reasons ;) (are there any other reasons), we have a postgres db, where the data are in iso-8859-15 encoding, but the "database encoding" is iso-8859-1. question(s): 1. is it possible to change the db-encoding? 2. if it remains like it is currently, when can there be problems? thanks, gabor
Am Dienstag, 27. September 2005 10:15 schrieb Gábor Farkas: > for historical reasons ;) (are there any other reasons), > we have a postgres db, > where the data are in iso-8859-15 encoding, > but the "database encoding" is iso-8859-1. > > question(s): > 1. is it possible to change the db-encoding? You can hack pg_database directly to change it. There shouldn't be a problem in this case. > 2. if it remains like it is currently, when can there be problems? Problems will only occur for characters which are not in both -1 and -15. For exampel, if you have text with a Euro symbol in your database, and the server wants to recode it to a different encoding because, say, the client runs in UTF-8, then you will get wrong output. So it's in your interest to fix this. -- Peter Eisentraut http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/
Peter Eisentraut wrote: > Am Dienstag, 27. September 2005 10:15 schrieb Gábor Farkas: > >>for historical reasons ;) (are there any other reasons), >>we have a postgres db, >>where the data are in iso-8859-15 encoding, >>but the "database encoding" is iso-8859-1. >> >>2. if it remains like it is currently, when can there be problems? > > > Problems will only occur for characters which are not in both -1 and -15. For > exampel, if you have text with a Euro symbol in your database, and the server > wants to recode it to a different encoding because, say, the client runs in > UTF-8, then you will get wrong output. So it's in your interest to fix this. so only at re-encoding? i'm asking because right now it works fine (yes, even for those chars that are different between -1 and -15). in other words, could you tell me a test-case when an error might happen? thanks, gabor