Re: Automatic detection of client encoding

I strongly object this idea. We already have had enough trouble with
initdb because of its locale awareness (I still think we should turn
on the --no-locale switch by default).
--
Tatsuo Ishii

> It is a common problem that a server uses a nontrivial character set
> encoding (e.g., Unicode) but users forget to set an appropriate
> client-side encoding. Then they get bogus displays for non-ASCII
> characters because their client isn't actually prepared for Unicode.
>
> There is a standard interface (SUSv2) for detecting the character set
> based on the locale settings. I suggest we use this (if available) in
> applications like psql and pg_dump by default unless it is overridden by
> the usual mechanisms. If the character set name obtained this way is not
> recognized by PostgreSQL, we fall back to SQL_ASCII.
>
> Here's a piece of code that shows how this would work:
>
> #include <stdio.h>
> #include <locale.h>
> #include <langinfo.h>
>
> int
> main(int argc, char *argv[])
> {
> setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
> printf("%s\n", nl_langinfo(CODESET));
> return 0;
> }
>
> (LC_CTYPE is the governing category for this.)
>
> Comments?
>
> --
> Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net
>
>
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