JDBC and character encoding

There is a problem using JDBC on machine with a character encoding
different from one used by backend. For instance, Russian version
of MS Windows uses codepage 1251, while in Russian Unix world most
widely used encoding is koi8-r.

I don't know whether there's standard way of dealing with this. Maybe
because I'm novice with Java & JDBC.

But having Java i18n facilities this problem could be easely solved.
There should be a per-connection property which will contain beckend's
encoding. So connecting with, say, such url
"jdbc:postgresql://host/database?encoding=KOI8-R"
will set this property to "KOI8-R". Functions to convert bytes to
characters and vice versa all have versions that accept encoding
argument. They should be used to perform such conversion.

I currently only have the driver from 6.3.2 distribution. I could
make a patch for it if JDBC maintainers agree with this proposal.

Regards,
Aleksey

--
Aleksey Demakov
avd@gcom.ru