Re: [DBD::Pg 2/2] Commit UTF-8 design notes/discussion between DWC/GSM

On Jul 21, 2011, at 4:23 PM, David Christensen wrote:

>> I disagree. It's me telling DBD::Pg what encoding the database uses, but I definitely want that converted to Perl's internal form. I *only* want raw if I explicitly ask for raw (or if there's no choice, such as when I set the encoding to ":raw" or something).
> 
> As a developer, why would you care if this information is available from the database itself?  If you are caring about the encoding at all, you would be dealing with bytes/octets.  Perl does not store unicode characters in any format besides UTF-8 so you're not changing "internal" characteristics ; what DBD::Pg uses to talk to your database shouldn't matter.

Because otherwise what's the point? I could just turn pg_unicode off.

>> I think of it being kind of like the `encdoding` pragma, in which I declare the encoding of my source code. Perl sees that and converts it to its internal form.
> 
> The only time this would be useful would be if your database is set to something inscrutable (aka SQL_ASCII); if your end result is meant to be internal perl, you have no business providing an encoding.

You are convincing me now that pg_encoding may not be useful at all, then.

>> I wonder if, as an interrime measure, existing code that sets pg_enable_utf8 should still do something, like set pg_encoding to "utf-8" and turn pg_unicode on.
> 
> Yeah, I'd had that thought, along with spitting the deprecation warning.

Right, I think that'd be the least painful thing for users.

> Yeah, it'd be nice to know what at least some proposed interfaces/APIs are so we don't need to support a whole other place setting for years to come.

+1

Best,

David