Re: UTF-8 support

----- Original Message -----
From: Tatsuo Ishii <t-ishii(at)sra(dot)co(dot)jp>
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2001 3:12 AM

> > Which ones belong to the backend and which ones to the frontend?
> > Or even more: which ones belong to the backend, which ones
> > to the frontend #1, which ones to the frontend #2, etc...
> >
> > For examle, I have two fronends:
> >
> > FE1: UNICODE, WIN1251
> > FE2: KOI8, UNICODE
> > BE: UNICODE, LATIN1, ALT
> >
> > Which ones SELECT pg_available_encodings(); will show?
> > The ones of the BE and the FE making the request?
> >
> > In case I need to communicate with BE using one common
> > encoding between the two if it is available.
>
> I'm confused.

Sorry, I was confused myself about how the mechanics of
of it works and confused you. :)

> What do you mean by BE? BE's encoding is determined by the database
> that FE chooses. If you just want to know what kind encodings are
> there in the database, why not use:
>
> SELECT DISTINCT ON (encoding) pg_encoding_to_char(encoding) AS
> encoding FROM pg_database;
>
> Also, FE's encoding could be any valid encoding that FE chooses,
> i.e. it' not BE's choice.

True. I gotta look at that.

> Can you show me more concrete examples showing what you actually want
> to do?

Once I have them completed and when per-columnt encoding support
will be available. Basically, it's gonna be
one BE supporting various encodings, and different kinds of clients
connecting to it, including Windows client as well as Linux. The database
will have text desriptions of some things in various languages,
(for now only languages I can communicate on: English, Spanish, French and
Russian, but they gonna be more in the future), and it would be nice to
know in advance what encoding is used in so appropriate conversion
is done before messages are retunred to clients, so I don't loose accents
like in French or Spanish or they don't get converted to some cyrillic
characters at the FE side (French accented characters tend to do that).

Anyway, when it gets to more concrete details and the project
becomes more tangible, I might come back with my questions :)

> >> 3) Is there a way to query available encodings in PostgreSQL for display in
> >> pgAdmin.
> >
> > Could pgAdmin display multibyte chars in the first place ?
>
> Wao. If pgAdmin could not display multibyte chars, all discussions
> here are meaningless:-<

The discussion aren't meaningless here,
and the pgAdmin team is working now on pgAdmin II,
which I hope will support multibyte characters.

--
S.