Re: UTF8 or Unicode

On Feb 14, 2005, at 9:27 PM, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote:
>
>> I know UTF8 is a type of unicode but do we need to rename anything
>> from Unicode to UTF8?
>
> I don't know. I'll go through the documentation to see if I can find
> anything that needs changing.
>
It's not the documentation that is wrong. Specifying the database
"encoding" as "Unicode" is simply a bug (see initdb). What if
postgresql supports UTF-16 in the future? What would you call it?

Also, the backend protocol also uses "UNICODE" when specifying the
encoding. All the other encoding names are specified correctly AFAICS.

I brought this up before:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2004-10/msg00811.php

We could make UTF8 the canonical form in the aliasing mechanism, but
beta 4 is a bit late to come up with this kind of idea.
--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/