Re: UTF8 with BOM support in psql

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>

From: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>, Chuck McDevitt <cmcdevitt@greenplum.com>, Itagaki Takahiro <itagaki.takahiro@oss.ntt.co.jp>, "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2009-11-17T18:22:24Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Tom Lane wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
>   
>> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>>     
>>> Well, someone could implement UTF-16 or UTF-whatever as client encoding.
>>> But I have not heard of any concrete proposals about that.
>>>       
>
>   
>> Doesn't the nul byte problem make that seriously hard?
>>     
>
> Just about impossible.  It would require a protocol bump, and removal of
> C-style string usage *everywhere* on the client side.
>
> Again, this is something that might be more feasible with encoding
> conversion inside psql --- translating UTF16 to UTF8 immediately upon
> reading it from any external file would confine the problem to possibly
> manageable bounds.
>
> 		
>   

Well, it might be a good idea to provide at least some support in libpq. 
Making each client do it from scratch seems a bit inefficient.

cheers

andrew