Hello. Thank you for your answer. I used the <raw> and </raw> tags, this is probably the reason why you couldn't see the messages... Thank you for the two links. I read this (in the second one): "On Windows, however, UTF-8 encoding can be used with any locale." yet I still have some questions... On Unix (Debian GNU Linux Squeeze): ========================================================================================= psql_cmd> \l ----------+----------+----------+-------------+------------ Name | Owner | Encoding | Collation | Ctype ----------+----------+----------+-------------+------------ template1 | postgres | UTF8 | en_us.UTF-8 | en_us.UTF-8 ========================================================================================= On Windows (XP): ========================================================================================= psql_cmd> \l ----------+----------+----------+----------------------------+--------------------------- Name | Owner | Encoding | Collation | Ctype ----------+----------+----------+----------------------------+--------------------------- template1 | postgres | UTF8 | English_United States.1252 | English_United States.1252 ========================================================================================= Question 1 Focusing on the "Collation" and "Ctype" columns, has "English_United States.1252" something to do with "Windows-1252" ("CP-1252")? "CP-1252" is an 8 bits character encoding (so, it can map codes to 2^8 characters at most). How compatible is this with an "UTF8" "Encoding"? For people testing PostgreSQL under Windows, is there any other more appropriate "Collation" that could be used to set a database collation? There is no "locale -a" command avaiblable under Windows. Is there any workaround? Question 2 Suppose I have a PostgreSQL table which has a VARCHAR column "text". Suppose I want to insert the string "Li 李" which contains the Chinese ideograph 李. How can I do this with an "INSERT INTO" command? I wish I could do something like: INSERT INTO t (text) VALUES ('Li U+674E') or INSERT INTO t (text) VALUES ('Li \u674E') How can I do this? Thanks and best regards. -- Léa -- View this message in context: http://postgresql.1045698.n5.nabble.com/Default-PostgreSQL-server-encoding-Change-to-unicode-utf8-tp5505985p5518720.html Sent from the PostgreSQL - general mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general