Re: UTF-8 encoding question regarding PhpPgAdmin development

Jean-Michel POURE writes:

> - Are some database encodings not translatable into UTF-8 using SET
> CLIENT_ENCODING = 'Unicode'. It used to be the case for Latin1, but it has
> been fixed now.

It should be possible. If not, it's a bug.

> - Some letters, like the euro sign, do not belong to Latin1. Example: let's
> say we have a Latin1 database and use SET CLIENT_ENCODING = 'Unicode'. If I
> input a euro sign, does it get rejected by PostgreSQL?

Currently, it gives you a warning and ignores the character. Not sure
that is ideal.

> - More generaly, is it safe to convert an Encoding (ex: Latin1 or Chinese
> multi-byte) into UTF-8 using SET CLIENT_ENCODING? Can all multi-byte
> encodings be converted into/from UTF-8 safely?

Some points to keep in mind: Some character sets contain characters that
are not in Unicode, although you might choose to ignore that fact because
it is of relatively minor importance. Round-trip conversion is not safely
possible, so if your tool provides a read/edit/write tool then you will
have problems. Finally, when you display East Asian characters you will
have a font problem because the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters
are mapped to the same range in Unicode but you are supposed to use
country-specific glyphs.

In short, I don't think what you are trying to do is easily achievable.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net