"Salem Berhanu" <salemb4@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > What exactly is the SQL_ASCII encoding in postgres? SQL_ASCII isn't so much an encoding as the declaration that you don't care about encodings. That setting simply disables encoding validity checks and encoding conversions. The server will take any byte string clients send it (barring only embedded zero bytes), and store and return it unchanged. Since it disables conversions, the notion of converting to another encoding is pretty much meaningless :-(. regards, tom lane