Thanks to both Dan Sugalski and Michael Glaesemann for answering my
question. I probably should have realized that, while Latin letters are
one byte, the fact that others are encoded into up to 5-byte groups
qualifies it as a multi-byte encoding. I don't anticipate having very
many non-latin letters in my database, I just want it to have the option
if it ever becomes necessary. So, UTF-8 is be much more space efficient
for my needs.
7.1 may be prehistoric, but it's running on an off-site server that I'm
renting, and this version came pre-installed. Since it's already there
and working, I'd like to get familiar with it before I try to reinstall
a newer version. I doubt I'd know what to do with many of the newer
features anyway, since this is my first time playing with PostgreSQL and
my knowledge is currently limited to simple relationships and basic SQL
queries.
Many thanks for the clarification,
Rich
>
> On Sep 17, 2004, at 9:39 AM, Richard Connamacher wrote:
>
> > UTF-8 is the 8-bit version of Unicode.
> > The multibyte version of Unicode is UTF-16.
>
> UTF-8 encodes characters with varying numbers of bytes, not just 1 byte
> per character. IIRC, it's anywhere from 1 to 5 bytes, actually.
> PostgreSQL uses UTF-8.
>
> If you can, upgrade. 7.1 is nearing prehistoric. :)
>
> Michael Glaesemann
> grzm myrealbox com
>
>