encoding question

Hi,

In phpPgAdmin, we automatically set the HTML page encoding to and encoding
that allows us to properly display the encoding of the current postgresql
database. I have a small problem with SQL_ASCII. Theoretically (and what
we currently do), we should set page encoding to US-ASCII. However,
Postgres seems to allow unlauts and all sorts of extra 8 bit data in ASCII
databases, so what encoding should I use. Is ISO-8859-1 a better choice?
Is SQL_ASCII basically equivalent to the LATIN1 encoding?

My other question is we play around with bytea fields to escape nulls and
chars < 32 and stuff so that when someone browses the table, they get
'\000<unknown>\000...', etc. However, are the other field types for which
we have to do this? Can you put nulls and stuff in text/varchar/char
fields? What about other fields?

Thanks,

Chris