Re: ENCODING (Unicode)

-----Original Message-----
From: Reshat Sabiq [mailto:sabiq@purdue.edu] 
Sent: 20 May 2003 00:33
To: pgadmin-support@postgresql.org
Subject: [pgadmin-support] ENCODING (Unicode)


To my surprise i recently found out that there is no 
difference in what encoding a database or even initdb has. 
I could insert and retrieve Unicode and extended ASCII with a 
Java program, and everything is good. However, when the 
values are displayed by pgadmin or a cygwin shell, both 
extended ASCII and Unicode characters are shown as a sequence 
of 2 characters, and those don't correspond to the bits one 
would expect to have if 2 byte-characer were split into 2 
1-byte  (8-bit) characters. The best explanation i could come 
up with is that pgAdminII is not supporting Unicode 
encodings, and the shell obviously also does not. This is not 
surprising, because most of pre-Java, pre-.NET apps were and 
are like that, although Windows has the notions of wchar... 
If i'm right, i wonder if Unicode is expected to be supported 
sometimes in the future. And in general all feedback is appreciated.   

Hi,

pgAdmin doesn't support Unicode as you say, primarily because Visual
Basic doesn't either (at least not to any degree of usefulness). pgAdmin
III will eventually support Unicode as it is being written in C++ with
eventual support being catered for as much as possible.

Regards, Dave. 

Thanks. Glad to hear about pgAdminIII...
To follow up on this topic:
Given that i can insert and retrieve Unicode values into either ASCII-based or Unicode-based DB, is Unicode-based DB less efficient? I remember reading something about it a while ago. I don't see immediately why that would be the case though, because special characters are 2 bytes either way, assuming we are not simplifying Unicode characters into ASCII.


Sincerely,
Reshat.

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