Unicode support on Win32

Caleb wrote:

Hi,

I am using Windows as a development environment (and database design),
and it seems that Unicode is not supported on Win32.

Yes, the problem is that we only support UTF-8 and the Win32 collation
routines only support UTF-16. You can actually use UTF-8 if you don't
care about ordering of the character set, but pginstaller doesn't
support those options --- you have to run initdb manually.

Is there word on when Unicode support will be implemented on the
Windows port of PostgreSQL?

I was used to using mySQL and it supported Unicode on Windows
properly.. But I suppose that the Windows port of PostgreSQL is still
working in progress.

It is not a "work in progress" as far as we are concerned. You have hit
a limitation, but it is ready for serious use.

On the other hand, could I pick a different charset for now, and when I
need to copy this whole database to a production machine (that will use
linux) choose the UTF-8 charset ?

Yes.

I also don't seem to understand why you need to define the whole
database as unicode ? Don't you only need unicode for certain fields,
and the rest can be Latin1?

No, we don't support per-table or per-column encodings yet either.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
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Bruce Momjian wrote:

Caleb wrote:

Hi,

I am using Windows as a development environment (and database design),
and it seems that Unicode is not supported on Win32.

Yes, the problem is that we only support UTF-8 and the Win32 collation
routines only support UTF-16. You can actually use UTF-8 if you don't
care about ordering of the character set, but pginstaller doesn't
support those options --- you have to run initdb manually.

I know this is the wrong list for it, but here are some thoughts about
solutions:
1. Convert to UTF-16 - Windows give you builtin functions to do that.
2. Use another library set (ICU?)

Shachar

--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
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