On Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 01:40:09PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bill Moseley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > - To clarify the first point, if the database is encoded utf-8 and
> > lc_collate is en_US then Postgresql does NOT try to convert utf-8 to
> > 8859-1 before sorting.
> 
> Basically, this is a horribly bad idea and you should never do it.
> The database encoding should always match what the locale assumes
> for its character set (unless the locale is "C", which doesn't care).

What's a bad idea?  Having a lc_collate on the cluster that doesn't
support the encodings in the databases?

> We'd enforce that you never do it if we knew a portable way to determine
> the character set assumed by an LC_COLLATE setting.

Again, not sure what "it" is, but I do find it confusing when the
cluster can have only one lc_collate, but the databases on that
cluster can have more than one encoding.  That's why I was asking
how postgresql handles (possibly) different encodings.

Are you saying that if a database is encoded as utf8 then the cluster
should be initiated with something like en_US.utf8?  And then all
databaes on that cluster should be encoded the same?



I suspect I don't understand how LC_COLLATE works that well.

I thought the locale defines the order of the characters, but not the
encoding of those characters.  Maybe that's not correct. I assumed the
same locale should sort the same chars represented in different
encodings the same way.  Maybe that's not the case:

    $ LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 locale charmap
    UTF-8

    $ LC_ALL=en_US locale charmap
    ISO-8859-1

    $ LC_ALL=C locale charmap
    ANSI_X3.4-1968

-- 
Bill Moseley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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