"rihad" <rihad@xxxxxxx> writes: >> If you want to support multiple encodings, the only safe locale choice >> is (and always has been) C. > > I should be ashamed for asking this, but would someone care to tell me how > encoding differs from locale? One you missed is a character set, which is just a set of possible characters (not bytes, abstract things called characters). An encoding is a mapping from a series of binary bytes to a series of characters from a character set, like UTF-8 or Big5 or just plain ascii. A locale is a set of rules for how to sort (collation), format dates, numbers, currencies, etc like es_US or jp_JP The problem is that a locale needs to know what the string it's looking is at to decide how to sort it, so it has to be designed for a particular encoding. In Unix that encoding is tacked on the end like en_US.UTF-8. C is a bit of special case since it sorts based on the binary representation rather than the characters. That's true for any 1-byte encoding based locale but C is more predictable when you actually have binary data. -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Ask me about EnterpriseDB's On-Demand Production Tuning ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
