Lee Hachadoorian <lee.hachadoorian@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > My database is encoded UTF8. I recently was uploading (via COPY) some > census data which included place names with ñ, é, ü, and other such > characters. The upload choked on the Latin characters. Following the > docs, I was able to fix this with: > SET CLIENT_ENCODING TO 'LATIN1'; > COPY table FROM 'filename'; > After which I > SET CLIENT_ENCODING TO 'UTF8'; > I typically use COPY FROM to bulk load data. My question is, is there > any disadvantage to setting the default client_encoding as LATIN1? I > expect to never be dealing with Asian languages, or most of the other > LATINx languages. If I ever try to COPY FROM data incompatible with > LATIN1, the command will just choke, and I can pick an appropriate > encoding and try again, right? Uh, no. You can pretty much assume that LATIN1 will take any random byte string; likewise for any other single-byte encoding. UTF8 as a default is a bit safer because it's significantly more likely that it will be able to detect non-UTF8 input. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
