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Message-ID: <b41c75520809250059n9a657abj3397b3e163b996bd@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:59:31 +0200
From: "Claus Guttesen" <kometen@gmail.com>
To: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
Subject: iso-8859-1 and utf-8
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Hi.

I found out by accident that my db-dump, at least in ver. 8.3.3,
automagically converts from iso-8859-1 to utf-8. Our db has been
around since January 2000 and iso-8859-1 was chosen back then as
encoding. When I occasionally imported the nightly dump to a test-db
it would complain very early during the import and abort if the
encoding was incorrect. I think this was also the case with 8.3.1
although I'm not certain.

Yesterday I did another import on my test-db and this was created with
utf-8 as encoding. The import did not complain and I ended up with an
utf-8-db which is what we have aimed at in the near future. Our web
had some iso-8859-1-quirks which we have solved.

I've started to plan a migration to utf-8. I assume it requires a
complete db-dump, delete the iso-8859-1-db, create an utf-8-db and do
an import. Previously I had piped the dump through iconv to convert
but this does not seem to be a requirement any longer.

-- 
regards
Claus

When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom,
the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

Shakespeare