Thread: Find out encoding of data

Hi!
I have this problem that Im not sure if my stored data has the correct
coding. When I view the data from a postgres console I just see the
characters and depending on my console-encoding it looks differently.

What I really want to see is the hexadecimal or octal value of the bytes of
the retrieved data. Can postgres give me this somehow (without exporting
tables to files and look at the files).

/br joynes
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joynes wrote:
> What I really want to see is the hexadecimal or octal value
> of the bytes of the retrieved data. Can postgres give me
> this somehow (without exporting tables to files and look at
> the files).

Maybe 'decode' can help you:

test=> SELECT decode('10EUR', 'escape');
     decode
----------------
 10\342\202\254
(1 row)

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

Hi!
This doesnt work for me but it is exactly what I want. When I run your
example I just get:

>SELECT decode('10EUR', 'escape');
 decode
--------
 10EUR
(1 rad)

I get the same result, both if the database is UTF8 or ISO-Latin1 and also
with different versions of postgres (7 and 8)

And when I read the documentation for 'decode' it tells that it just decodes
binary strings encoded with 'encode'.
How did you get that result from running decode?


/br joynes
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joynes wrote:
> This doesnt work for me but it is exactly what I want. When I run your
> example I just get:
>
> >SELECT decode('10EUR', 'escape');
>  decode
> --------
>  10EUR
> (1 rad)
>
> I get the same result, both if the database is UTF8 or
> ISO-Latin1 and also
> with different versions of postgres (7 and 8)
>
> And when I read the documentation for 'decode' it tells that
> it just decodes
> binary strings encoded with 'encode'.
> How did you get that result from running decode?

I suspect that somewhere along the line the Euro symbol I
used in the query got changed to 'EUR'.

Try some other string with weird characters.

It will show all non-ASCII characters in escaped octal
notation, while ASCII characters will remain as they are.

This should help you - if I understood you correctly,
you want to know the actual bytes stored in a database
field. To find our the numeric representation of an ASCII
field, you can use the function ascii().

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

Yeah you're right.

I didnt test it with any special characters. It works when I do :)

Thx a lot!

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