Re: Multibyte encoding vs. SQL_ASCII vs. locales and European languages

On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 11:01:25AM -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 04:31:39PM +0100,
>   Frank Joerdens <frank@joerdens.de> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 01:41:16PM +0100, Frank Schafer wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2002-01-29 at 13:03, Frank Joerdens wrote:
> > > > Call me stupid - but I am trying to understand what multibyte encoding
> > > > (aka Latin1) ...
> >
> > ??? What did you mean??? (did your mailer screw things up so I am only
> > seeing exclamation and question marks or did you try to tell me
> > something that way?).
>
> Latin 1 is not a multibyte code, so I think he was commenting on your
> example.

True. What I meant was that you can't specify the encoding LATIN1 with
PostgreSQL if you didn't compile in multibyte support (I know it's
generally a bad plan to be so elliptical in list postings . . . ).
Although technically presumably you can fit Latin1 characters into a
single byte. Hence my question was not "What do I gain from multibyte
support when I don't need multibyte support?" but "what do I get from
specifying Latin1 encoding (which is only available when compiling
with --enable-multibyte) and what do I lose when using locales or
sql_ascii?". The advantage when using locale support over no locale
support is that I can e.g. rely on ORDER BY dealing correctly with my
German umlauts (to_char and friends plus like and ~ are also affected).
However, you incur a performance penalty with the LIKE operator . . .

Regards, Frank