Re: character encoding in StartupMessage

Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> writes:
>> I could not find anything in the Frontend/Backend protocol docs about 
>> character encoding in the StartupMessage. Assuming it is legal for a 
>> database or user name to have unicode characters, how is this handled 
>> when nothing yet has been said about the client encoding?

> A similar badness is that if you issue CREATE DATABASE from a UTF8 
> database, the dbname will be stored as UTF8.  Then, if you go to a 
> LATIN1 database and create another it will be stored as LATIN1.

Yeah, this has been discussed before.  Database and user names both
have this affliction.

I don't see any very nice solution at the moment.  Once we get support
for per-column locales, it might be possible to declare that the shared
catalogs are always in UTF8 encoding and get the necessary
conversions to happen automatically.
        regards, tom lane