I wrote: > We've known about this and related issues with gettext for some time, > but a bulletproof solution isn't clear. For the moment all you can > do is be real careful about making your locale settings match up. I forgot to mention that it works fine if the server is told the client encoding actually being used: postgres=# \encoding iso8859-1 postgres=# \l Liste der Datenbanken Name | Eigentümer | Kodierung ------------+------------+----------- postgres | tgl | UTF8 regression | tgl | SQL_ASCII template0 | tgl | UTF8 template1 | tgl | UTF8 (4 Zeilen) postgres=# \d Keine Relationen gefunden postgres=# A possible solution therefore is to have psql or libpq drive the client_encoding off the client's locale environment instead of letting it default to equal the server_encoding. But I'm not sure what downsides that would have, and in any case it's not entirely clear that we can always derive the correct Postgres encoding name from the system's locale info. regards, tom lane