Re: What's a good default encoding?

On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 07:30:36AM +0100, Harald Armin Massa wrote:
> Good default encoding:
>
> does somebody NOT agree that UTF8 is quite a recommendation, at least for
> all the people without Korean, Japanese and Chinese Chars? I know, that's at
> maximum 2/3 of our potential user base, but better then nothing.

Umm, you should choose an encoding supported by your platform and the
locales you use. For example, UTF-8 is a bad choice on *BSD because
there is no collation support for UTF-8 on those platforms. On
Linux/Glibc UTF-8 is well supported but you need to make sure the
locale you initdb with is a UTF-8 locale. By and large postgres
correctly autodetects the encoding from the locale.

> Maybe we could even "suggest" UTF8 in the "getting started" (i.e. the
> windows installer initdb screen, or other default installations) Sth. like
> "if you do not know better, take utf8"

UTF-8 on windows works pretty well.

Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog@svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a
> tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone
> else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.