ENCODING (Unicode)

To my surprise i recently found out that there is no difference in what encoding a database or even initdb has.
I could insert and retrieve Unicode and extended ASCII with a Java program, and everything is good. However, when the values are displayed by pgadmin or a cygwin shell, both extended ASCII and Unicode characters are shown as a sequence of 2 characters, and those don't correspond to the bits one would expect to have if 2 byte-characer were split into 2 1-byte (8-bit) characters. The best explanation i could come up with is that pgAdminII is not supporting Unicode encodings, and the shell obviously also does not. This is not surprising, because most of pre-Java, pre-.NET apps were and are like that, although Windows has the notions of wchar...
If i'm right, i wonder if Unicode is expected to be supported sometimes in the future. And in general all feedback is appreciated.

Sincerely,
Reshat.

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