Re: No fun with MS Access and Latin1

From: "Philippe Lang" <philippe(dot)lang(at)attiksystem(dot)ch>
To: "Christof Glaser" <gcg(at)gl(dot)aser(dot)de>, <pgsql-odbc(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: No fun with MS Access and Latin1
Date: 2004-09-08 06:21:28
Message-ID: 6C0CF58A187DA5479245E0830AF84F420803EC@poweredge.attiksystem.ch
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Hello Christof,

What ODBC driver are you using?

There are 3 drivers: Postgresql, Postgresql Legacy, Postgresql Unicode.

I'm using the first one "Postgresql", (snapshot 208 or 209), with Access 2000, 2002 or 2003 without any problem. I haven't tried Access 97.

My databases are encoded in LATIN1 as well, for French. Update with accents are fine, at least with PGSQL 7.3.x and 7.4.x.

I hope this helps.

Bye

Philippe

-----Message d'origine-----
De : pgsql-odbc-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:pgsql-odbc-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] De la part de Christof Glaser
Envoyé : mardi, 7. septembre 2004 19:48
À : pgsql-odbc(at)postgresql(dot)org
Objet : [ODBC] No fun with MS Access and Latin1

Greetings,

I've some troubles with MS Access 97 and PG 8 Beta1, both on Windows XP Pro (German, locale is Windows Codepage 1252 wich shoud be equivalent to Latin1?).

The database encoding is Latin1. The ODBC driver (the one from the MSI installer package, version 7.05.02) sets the client encoding to UTF-8.

The database is populated with a dump from a sybase database encoded in Latin1. Notepad shows all characters correctly.

Selecting data in Access works and displays even German umlauts correctly
-- if and only if the primary key field is not of type varchar.
In this case every row and column is displayed as "#Deleted". Adding an oid column and using fake oid index helps here as a workaround.

But updating a row which contains an umlaut (in any field) or inserting a row with umlauts fails. From the error message and log file it seems as if Access sends Latin1 instead of UTF8 data. (The error is something like "Cannot convert char 0x0.. to UTF8", and the hex number is the ASCII/Latin1 equivalent of the first umlaut in the row.)

Inserting a fresh row works if I paste the UTF8 represention of the umlauts as Latin1 into the form: instead of "hälp" I insert "hälp".
Refreshing shows "hälp" as it should be.

If i insert just "hälp" I get "hp" back. If the umlaut happens to be the last character of the field, it yields a syntax error as the conversion somehow eats the closing single quote from the update statement, producing a single random character instead of <umlaut><single quote>.

Updating a row which already contains umlauts does not work at all, because Access restricts the update with a where clause which states the umlaut field, yielding the "Cannot convert..." error.

Specifying "set client_encoding to 'Latin1'" in the ODBC DSN settings makes umlauts appear as question mark in Access.

Using Unicode as the database encoding doesn't help either, and I'd rather avoid that, if possible.

What do I do wrong? Is this a bug in Access or in the ODBC driver?

Browsing the archives/faq/how to's did not reveal much help, except that using a non-Unicode ODBC driver works well for French. How do I find such a driver, or how do I tell it not to use Unicode at all?

Any help would be appreciated.

TIA,

Christof Glaser
--
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