On 28/03/13 22:07, Don Parris wrote: > From the postgresql.conf file: > #client_encoding = sql_ascii # actually, defaults to database > encoding > > The way I understand it, the client should default to whatever encoding > the DB uses. Sounds like they tried to make it difficult to do what I > apparently did.
Yes, you're right. However, when you do the cluster initdb, the template0 database gets created with whatever encoding is specified to initdb (IIRC nowadays the default is UTF-8, but in some previous version the default used to be SQL_ASCII). After that, any createdb that doesn't specify an encoding defaults to the template0 encoding. So if your template0 has SQL_ASCII encoding, it's very easy to create a database with that encoding.