Change the character encoding of a database

Hi All,

I do have a database which was created with the encoding SQL_ASCII and used
with German, French and Italien strings. Until recently there was only a
Linux client, an all worked fine (Suse 8.1). Now there is a new Windows
client which does have a different idea of the encoding. I did some tests and
found out that the encoding UNICODE does work properly for both clients.
The question now is how to change the encoding of database from SQL_ASCII to
UNICODE?

I did try to dump the database by pgdump database > dump.dmp, droped the
database, recreate it with the encoding UNICODE and restore the dump by psql
database < dump.dmp which worked after some small changes (change the client
encoding to UNICODE) in the dump.dmp. Without the changes in the dump.dmp
there was a error message about invalide codes and no import at all. With the
changes there are still some encoding mistakes (wrong signes in the strings)
but the import basically works. The server actually runs on the same machine
as the client (Suse 8.1). I think there is a problem with the import because
the linux system is not set to use UNICODE. Is there an way to get the data
converted correctly?
--
Ivo Rossacher