Re: Questionable description about character sets
Tatsuo Ishii <ishii@postgresql.org>
From: Tatsuo Ishii <ishii@postgresql.org>
To: andreas@proxel.se
Cc: pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2026-02-14T10:20:33Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Attachments
- v1-0001-doc-Enhance-PostgreSQL-Character-Sets-table.patch (text/x-patch)
> Wouldn't that make the table very wide? I don't think it would make the table very wide but a little bit wider. So I think adding the character sets information to "Description" column is better. Some of encodings already have the info. See attached patch. > And for e.g. European > character encodings I am not sure it is that useful since most or > maybe even all of them are subsets of unicode, it mostly gets > interesting for encodings which support characters not in unicode, > right? Choosing UTF8 or not is just one of the use cases. I am thinking about the use case in which user wants to continue to use other encodings (e.g. wants to avoid conversion to UTF8). Example: suppose the user has a legacy system in which EUC_JP is used. The data in the system includes JIS X 0201, JIS X 0208 and JIS X 0212, and he wants to make sure that PostgreSQL supports all those character sets in EUC_JP, because some tools does not support JIS X 0212. Only JIS X 0212 and JIS X 0208 are supported. Currently the info (whether JIS X 0212 is supported or not) does not exist anywhere in our docs. It's only in the source code. I think it's better to have the info in our docs so that user does not need to look into the source code. Best regards, -- Tatsuo Ishii SRA OSS K.K. English: http://www.sraoss.co.jp/index_en/ Japanese:http://www.sraoss.co.jp