daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ("Daniel Verite") wrote in message news:<20050411035003.3592776@localhost>... > Fritz Bayer wrote: > > > I have a java program, which writes words containing german umlauts > > like äöü into the database. As you probably know, those characters > > belong to the ISO-8859-1 character encoding set. > > > > In my java webapplication those umlauts (äöü) get displayed correctly. > > So they actually get stored correctly in the database. > > > > However, when I use postgresql's psql client I those characters get > > displayed incorretly. > > > > For example the city name "münchen" gets displayed as "mÃ?nchen". Not > > so in my webapplication. There the city name in the HTML code appears > > corretly as "münchen". > > > > So why is psql not displaying the unicode characters correclty? Or > > could it be that my xterm can not handle unicode characters? > > From your description it really looks like the latter. You can issue > \encoding latin1 > inside psql > Thanks for you help. Now I undestand. It's true somehow my terminal does not handle unicode characters. After I entered "\encoding latin1" as you suggested everything works fine. So the answer is that without that unicode characters get displayed. But in which encoding? I guess utf8 or utf16... But why doesn that fail only for äüö? Shouldn't any other letter encoded in utf16 also fail? I mean unicode itself is 16 bit long. So "münchen" should expand to 14 characters. But only ü expands to two characters. > or you can also set the PGCLIENTENCODING environment variable to latin1 > before launching psql on non-unicode aware terminals. > > > Can somebody help me out here? Should I create the databases as LATIN1 > > instead of UNICODE? And how can I transform my current databases into > > LATIN1 ones? They should be compatible, because all characters I use > > are only äöü, which are downward compatible. > > But then you'll have trouble with your java app if you do that. Java works with > unicode strings, so it makes sense to have the db contents in unicode as well. No thats ok. Java communicates with psql using unicode only. That's why it also worked... ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)