Hi! This doesnt work for me but it is exactly what I want. When I run your example I just get: >SELECT decode('10EUR', 'escape'); decode -------- 10EUR (1 rad) I get the same result, both if the database is UTF8 or ISO-Latin1 and also with different versions of postgres (7 and 8) And when I read the documentation for 'decode' it tells that it just decodes binary strings encoded with 'encode'. How did you get that result from running decode? /br joynes -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Find-out-encoding-of-data-tf4549554.html#a12995704 Sent from the PostgreSQL - general mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster