Re: BUG #7493: Postmaster messages unreadable in a Windows console

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 11:47 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> If we knew that postgresql.conf was stored in, say, UTF8, then it would
> probably be possible to perform encoding conversion to get string
> variables into the database encoding.  Perhaps we should allow some
> magic syntax to tell us the encoding of a config file?
>
>         file_encoding = 'utf8'  # must precede any non-ASCII in the file

If we're going to do that we might as well use the Emacs standard
-*-coding: latin-1;-*-

But that said I'm not sure saying the whole file is in an encoding is
the right approach. Paths are actually binary strings. any encoding is
purely for display purposes anyways. Log line formats could be treated
similarly if we choose.

Hostnames would need to be in a particular encoding if we're to
generate punycode I think but I think that particular encoding would
have to be UTF8. Converting from some other encoding would be error
prone and unnecessarily complex.

What parts of postgresql.conf are actually encoded strings that need
to be (and can be) manipulated as encoded strings?

-- 
greg