Re: UTF8 with BOM support in psql

On tis, 2009-11-17 at 23:22 -0500, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Itagaki Takahiro wrote:
> > I don't want user to check the encoding of scripts before executing
> --
> > it is far from fail-safe.
> >
> >
> >   
> 
> That's what we require in all other cases. Why should UTF8 be special?

But now we're back to the original problem.  Certain editors insert BOMs
at the beginning of the file.  And that is by any definition before the
embedded client encoding declaration.  I think the only ways to solve
this are:

1) Ignore the BOM if a client encoding declaration of UTF8 appears in a
narrowly defined location near the beginning of the file (XML and
PEP-0263 style).  For *example*, we could ignore the BOM if the file
starts with exactly "<BOM>\encoding UTF8\n".  Would probably not work
well in practice.

2) Parse two alternative versions of the file, one with the BOM ignored
and one with the BOM not ignored, until you need to make a decision.
Hilariously complicated, but would perhaps solve the problem.

3) Give up, do nothing.