Re: Questionabl description in datatype.sgml

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 11:58:58AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Tatsuo Ishii <ishii(at)postgresql(dot)org> writes:
> > In "8.13.2. Encoding Handling"
> > <para>
> > When using binary mode to pass query parameters to the server
> > and query results back to the client, no character set conversion
> > is performed, so the situation is different. In this case, an
> > encoding declaration in the XML data will be observed, and if it
> > is absent, the data will be assumed to be in UTF-8 (as required by
> > the XML standard; note that PostgreSQL does not support UTF-16).
> > On output, data will have an encoding declaration
> > specifying the client encoding, unless the client encoding is
> > UTF-8, in which case it will be omitted.
> > </para>
>
> > In the first sentence shouldn't "no character set conversion" be "no
> > encoding conversion"? PostgreSQL is doing client/server encoding
> > conversion, rather than character set conversion.
>
> I think the text is treating "character set conversion" as meaning
> the same thing as "encoding conversion"; certainly I've never seen
> any place in our docs that draws a distinction between those terms.
> If you think there is a difference, maybe we need to define those
> terms somewhere.

Uh, I think Unicode is a character set, and UTF8 is an encoding. I
think Tatsuo is right here.

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Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
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