A question about postgresql 8.1 and UTF strings

Good day all,

I have postgresql 8.1 (on WINXP service pack 2).

I have a table t_users with the columns id (serial),  username ( varchar(256) ), and password ( varchar(256) )

The database was created with UT8 encoding.

I have 5 users at the database, and some of them have non-latin (especially hebrew) usernames, i entered these non latin values simply by using the pgadmin gui (was i correct to do so?) to enter the non-latin strings.

I opened a jdbc connection using a standard postgres JDBC URL and selected a recordset with a hebrew username.

I used String user = ResultSet.GetString("username") to get the String (which contains 4 hebrew letters)

and then I used

 

System.out.println(user.getBytes().length) - however, instead of seeing 8 bytes (2 bytes per each character, 4 characters ), i saw 4 bytes ....

Can you please tell me what is it that I'm doing wrong?

 

Thanks

 

Yair