Unicode is not UTF-8. was :psqlODBC-Driver Test / text fields

Dave Page schrieb:
> If 'ö' is 'ö', then isn't the query above mixing single and a multibyte encoding? Ie. It should all be single byte - e.g.
>
> select name from kunde where name >= 'ö' order by name asc;
>
> Or all multibyte (displayed byte by byte) whatever that results in:
>
> s*e*l*e*c*t* *n*a*m*e* *f*r*o*m* *k*u*n*d*e* *w*h*e*r*e* *n*a*m*e* *>*=* *'*ö'*;*
>
> Of course, we all know how well I grok encoding issues :-)
>
Hi Dave,

I can understand you. This encoding issues drive me also crazy some
times. :-)

The problem with UTF-8 is that all ASCII characters are represented by
one byte and all non ASCII characters, e.g. German Umlauts, are
represented by two bytes. That's why UTF-8 is called a "variable-length
multibyte encoding". In a pure Unicode world, e.g. U+xxxx with two
bytes, every character is represented by two bytes (fixed-length
multibyte encoding). So Unicode is not equal to UTF-8, even though the
PostgreSQL documentation is stating that.

If you like, see: http://www.utf8-chartable.de/ or some explanation at
http://czyborra.com/utf/

Windows XP supports ANSI, UTF-8, Unicode and Unicode Big Endian.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) Windows seems to use UTF-8 for European
languages. Hiroshi can you explain that? I guess the Japanese edition of
Windows XP is using pure 2 byte Unicode.

I can't say anything about psql. But the new psqlodbc driver 7.03.26X
seems to handle that situation very well.

So I suppose the test was valid to a certain extend, since the
characters are handled in this mixed way in Win XP. I still have some
funny behaviour with Unicode in psql (even after setting LC_COLLATE
correctly :-) ).

For my production machines I will anyway use ISO-8859-1 (or
ISO-8859-15). Then the driver will convert all characters to single byte
avoiding all kind of problems.

But feel free to ask me for tests... ;-)

Regards,
Johann