On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 02:44:45AM -0700, John R Pierce wrote: > support the bastardized UTF-16 'unicode' implemented by Windows NT To be fair to Microsoft, while the BOM might be an irritant, they do use a perfectly legitimate encoding of Unicode. There is no Unicode requirement that code points be stored as UTF-8, and there is a strong argument to be made that, for some languages, UTF-8 is extremely inefficient and therefore the least preferred encoding. (Microsoft's dependence on the BOM with UTF-16 -- really UCS2 -- is problematic, of course, and appears to be adjusted in funny ways in Win 7.) Because all wire protocols from the IETF use UTF-8 for Unicode encoding, your best bet is still UTF-8 for maximal portability, so your point about needing to make the database encoding and client locale UTF-8 is correct. Best, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general