I try to solve a litle problem, with PostgreSQL 8.1.3 on windows with UTF8.
I read all the documentation related to psql on windows, I turn my cmd.exe encoding to codepage 1252 with the good font.
When I try a connection to my UTF8 database with psql (with my windows cp1252 terminal) I have some problems like \d produce an error : "ERROR: invalid UTF-8 byte sequence detected near byte 0xe9", because my client_encoding is set to UTF8.
So I try to set my encoding to "win1252" with \encoding win1252 and it's work beter. I would like to set it by default but for psql only (all other programs speak UTF8).
I tried various things with the --set option of psql without success, like --set client_encoding=win1252 or --set CLIENT_ENCODING=win1252 or --set encoding=win1252.
I think my syntax is good but that doesn't work.
This part of the man page doesn't sound realy good to me (concerning the --set option) : "These assignments are done during a very early stage of start-up, so variables reserved for internal purposes might get overwritten later."
But you are my last change before reading the source code, so please tell me if you have any clue :)