Greetings,
I've some troubles with MS Access 97 and PG 8 Beta1, both on Windows XP Pro
(German, locale is Windows Codepage 1252 wich shoud be equivalent to
Latin1?).
The database encoding is Latin1. The ODBC driver (the one from the MSI
installer package, version 7.05.02) sets the client encoding to UTF-8.
The database is populated with a dump from a sybase database encoded in
Latin1. Notepad shows all characters correctly.
Selecting data in Access works and displays even German umlauts correctly
-- if and only if the primary key field is not of type varchar.
In this case every row and column is displayed as "#Deleted". Adding
an oid column and using fake oid index helps here as a workaround.
But updating a row which contains an umlaut (in any field) or inserting
a row with umlauts fails. From the error message and log file it seems as if Access
sends Latin1 instead of UTF8 data. (The error is something like "Cannot
convert char 0x0.. to UTF8", and the hex number is the ASCII/Latin1
equivalent of the first umlaut in the row.)
Inserting a fresh row works if I paste the UTF8 represention of the
umlauts as Latin1 into the form: instead of "hälp" I insert "hälp".
Refreshing shows "hälp" as it should be.
If i insert just "hälp" I get "hp" back. If the umlaut happens to be the
last character of the field, it yields a syntax error as the conversion
somehow eats the closing single quote from the update statement, producing
a single random character instead of <umlaut><single quote>.
Updating a row which already contains umlauts does not work at all, because
Access restricts the update with a where clause which states the umlaut
field, yielding the "Cannot convert..." error.
Specifying "set client_encoding to 'Latin1'" in the ODBC DSN settings
makes umlauts appear as question mark in Access.
Using Unicode as the database encoding doesn't help either, and I'd
rather avoid that, if possible.
What do I do wrong? Is this a bug in Access or in the ODBC driver?
Browsing the archives/faq/how to's did not reveal much help, except
that using a non-Unicode ODBC driver works well for French. How do I find
such a driver, or how do I tell it not to use Unicode at all?
Any help would be appreciated.
TIA,
Christof Glaser
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