Re: Questions about pg_enable_utf8

On Sep 8, 2008, at 20:42, Bill Moseley wrote:

> Ok, how formal would you need?
>
> I guess my proposal would be to perhaps have a flag that when set
> causes DBD::Pg to read the client_encoding after making a connection.
> Then use that encoding with Encode::encode() and Encode::decode() when
> moving data between Perl and Pg.

Frankly, I think that this should be a part of the DBI. But note that  
some databases have different encodings on different columns.

> The implementation details are a bit more sketchy. ;)
>
> For one thing, I'm not sure if the client_encoding returned from Pg
> would match with the encoding names used by Perl.

Should be do-able.

> Then, would also need to know what data should and should not be
> decoded and encoded.  I guess everything except binary (and numeric?)
> column data.

I think only text types and text-like types (Greg, how does DBD::Pg  
determine this, currently? I'd want CITEXT data to be converted to  
UTF-8, too; is there some way to tell it what types should be utf8?)

> But, the current system seems to work fine -- someone can simply use
> utf8 client encoding and set pg_enable_utf8 (regardless of their
> database's encoding).  And it's unlikely that Perl's internal
> representation of character data will change from utf8 anytime soon
> so just forcing the utf8 flag is fine.

Yep.

Best,

David