Re: text column constraint, newbie question

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 3:11 PM, RebeccaJ <rebeccaj(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Scott, your comment above introduced some new concepts to me, and now
> I'm thinking about foreign language text and other ways to be more
> flexible. I found this page that talks about encoding:
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/multibyte.html
> And I wonder why you like SQL_ASCII better than UTF8, and whether
> others have any opinions about those two. (My web server's LC_CTYPE is
> C, so I can use any character set.) Wouldn't UTF8 allow more
> characters than SQL_ASCII?

No, SQL_ASCII will allow anything you wanna put into the database to
go in, with no checking. UTF8 will require properly formed and valud
UTF characters. Which is better depends a lot on what you're doing.
Note that SQL_ASCII is not 8 bit ASCII, it's a name for "anything
goes" instead. (Now Cole Porter is running through my head.. :) )