Character encoding for Postgres API function return values?

Question

I have a 9.0 postgres server instance and a database using UTF8 character encoding with German_Germany.1252 collation. I'm trying to get my libpq error messages on the client as US-ASCII strings. To this end I do:
PQsetClientEncoding( connection, "SQL_ASCII" );
which returns no error. However, the strings returned from PQerrorMessage() still seem to be UTF8.
Is the return value from PQerrorMessage always guaranteed to be UTF8? No matter the client/server settings?

Peter Eisentraut · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-14 04:49:56Z

2

SQL_ASCII as a client encoding means, pass the bytes through as is, which is exactly what you didn't want. There actually isn't any client encoding that corresponds to just ASCII. If your messages are in German, then you might want a setting such as LATIN1 or LATIN9. Otherwise change the language to English and the messages will be in ASCII anyway.

answered Apr 14, 2011 at 4:49

Peter Eisentraut

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