> Umm, I think all you showed was that the to_ascii() function was > broken. Postgres knows exactly what encoding the string is in, the > backend encoding: in your case UTF-8. That would be fine, if it were true; then, one could assume that every postgresql function that returns a text gets ALWAYS the standard backend encoding (again: as in Java). But consider the result postgresql gets from this (from my example): encode(convert_to(c,'LATIN9'),'escape') That's something of type text (a strign), postgresql believes it's UTF8, but it's not (it probably woud not even validate as a valid utf8 sequence). IMHO, the semantics of encode() and decode() are correct (the bridge between bytea and text ... in the backend encoding; they should be the only bridge), convert() is also ok (deals with bytes), but convert_to() and convert_from() are dubious if not broken: they imply texts in arbitrary encodings (for output or input) , lead to anomalities and shouldnt be necessary at all. Cheers Hernán J. González http://hjg.com.ar/ ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly