5.2. Multibyte Support

Author: Tatsuo Ishii (), last updated 2000-03-22. Check Tatsuo's web site for more information.

Multibyte (MB) support is intended to allow PostgreSQL to handle multiple-byte character sets such as EUC (Extended Unix Code), Unicode, and Mule internal code. With MB enabled you can use multibyte character sets in regular expressions (regexp), LIKE, and some other functions. The default encoding system is selected while initializing your PostgreSQL installation using initdb. Note that this can be overridden when you create a database using createdb or by using the SQL command CREATE DATABASE. So you can have multiple databases each with a different encoding system.

5.2.1. Enabling Multibyte Support

Run configure with the multibyte option:

./configure --enable-multibyte[=encoding_system]

where encoding_system can be one of the values in the following table:

Important: Before PostgreSQL7.2, LATIN5 mistakenly meant ISO 8859-5. From 7.2 on, LATIN5 means ISO 8859-9. If you have a LATIN5 database created on 7.1 or earlier and want to migrate to 7.2 (or later), you should be very careful about this change.

Important: Not all APIs supports all the encodings listed above. For example, the PostgreSQL JDBC driver does not support MULE_INTERNAL, LATIN6, LATIN8, and LATIN10.

Here is an example of configuring PostgreSQL to use a Japanese encoding by default:

$ ./configure --enable-multibyte=EUC_JP

If the encoding system is omitted (./configure --enable-multibyte), SQL_ASCII is assumed.

5.2.2. Setting the Encoding

initdb defines the default encoding for a PostgreSQL installation. For example:

$ initdb -E EUC_JP

sets the default encoding to EUC_JP (Extended Unix Code for Japanese). Note that you can use --encoding instead of -E if you prefer to type longer option strings. If no -E or --encoding option is given, the encoding specified at configure time is used.

You can create a database with a different encoding:

$ createdb -E EUC_KR korean

will create a database named korean with EUC_KR encoding. Another way to accomplish this is to use a SQL command:

CREATE DATABASE korean WITH ENCODING = 'EUC_KR';

The encoding for a database is represented as an encoding column in the pg_database system catalog. You can see that by using the -l option or the \l command of psql.

$ psql -l
            List of databases
   Database    |  Owner  |   Encoding    
---------------+---------+---------------
 euc_cn        | t-ishii | EUC_CN
 euc_jp        | t-ishii | EUC_JP
 euc_kr        | t-ishii | EUC_KR
 euc_tw        | t-ishii | EUC_TW
 mule_internal | t-ishii | MULE_INTERNAL
 regression    | t-ishii | SQL_ASCII
 template1     | t-ishii | EUC_JP
 test          | t-ishii | EUC_JP
 unicode       | t-ishii | UNICODE
(9 rows)

5.2.3. Automatic encoding translation between server and client

PostgreSQL supports an automatic encoding translation between server and client for some encodings. The available combinations are listed in Table 5-2.

To enable the automatic encoding translation, you have to tell PostgreSQL the encoding you would like to use in the client. There are several ways to accomplish this.

5.2.4. About Unicode

An automatic encoding translation between Unicode and other encodings has been supported since PostgreSQL 7.1. For 7.1 it was not enabled by default. To enable this feature, run configure with the --enable-unicode-conversion option. Note that this requires the --enable-multibyte option also.

For 7.2, --enable-unicode-conversion is not necessary. The Unicode conversion functionality is automatically enabled if --enable-multibyte is specified.

5.2.5. What happens if the translation is not possible?

Suppose you choose EUC_JP for the server and LATIN1 for the client, then some Japanese characters cannot be translated into LATIN1. In this case, a letter that cannot be represented in the LATIN1 character set would be transformed as:

(HEXA DECIMAL)

5.2.6. References

These are good sources to start learning about various kinds of encoding systems.

ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/nutshell/ujip/doc/cjk.inf

Detailed explanations of EUC_JP, EUC_CN, EUC_KR, EUC_TW appear in section 3.2.

http://www.unicode.org/

The web site of the Unicode Consortium

RFC 2044

UTF-8 is defined here.

5.2.7. History

Dec 7, 2000
	* An automatic encoding translation between Unicode and other
	  encodings are implemented
	* Changes above will appear in 7.1

May 20, 2000
	* SJIS UDC (NEC selection IBM kanji) support contributed
	  by Eiji Tokuya
	* Changes above will appear in 7.0.1

Mar 22, 2000
	* Add new libpq functions PQsetClientEncoding, PQclientEncoding
	* ./configure --with-mb=EUC_JP
	  now deprecated. use 
	  ./configure --enable-multibyte=EUC_JP
	  instead
  	* Add SQL_ASCII regression test case
	* Add SJIS User Defined Character (UDC) support
	* All of above will appear in 7.0

July 11, 1999
	* Add support for WIN1250 (Windows Czech) as a client encoding
	  (contributed by Pavel Behal)
	* fix some compiler warnings (contributed by Tomoaki Nishiyama)

Mar 23, 1999
	* Add support for KOI8(KOI8-R), WIN(CP1251), ALT(CP866)
	  (thanks Oleg Broytmann for testing)
	* Fix problem with MB and locale

Jan 26, 1999
	* Add support for Big5 for frontend encoding
	  (you need to create a database with EUC_TW to use Big5)
	* Add regression test case for EUC_TW
	  (contributed by Jonah Kuo )

Dec 15, 1998
	* Bugs related to SQL_ASCII support fixed

Nov 5, 1998
	* 6.4 release. In this version, pg_database has "encoding"
	  column that represents the database encoding

Jul 22, 1998
	* determine encoding at initdb/createdb rather than compile time
	* support for PGCLIENTENCODING when issuing COPY command
	* support for SQL92 syntax "SET NAMES"
	* support for LATIN2-5
	* add UNICODE regression test case
	* new test suite for MB
	* clean up source files

Jun 5, 1998
	* add support for the encoding translation between the backend
	  and the frontend
	* new command SET CLIENT_ENCODING etc. added
	* add support for LATIN1 character set
	* enhance 8-bit cleanliness

April 21, 1998 some enhancements/fixes
	* character_length(), position(), substring() are now aware of 
	  multi-byte characters
	* add octet_length()
	* add --with-mb option to configure
	* new regression tests for EUC_KR
  	  (contributed by Soonmyung Hong)
	* add some test cases to the EUC_JP regression test
	* fix problem in regress/regress.sh in case of System V
	* fix toupper(), tolower() to handle 8bit chars

Mar 25, 1998 MB PL2 is incorporated into PostgreSQL 6.3.1

Mar 10, 1998 PL2 released
	* add regression test for EUC_JP, EUC_CN and MULE_INTERNAL
	* add an English document (this file)
	* fix problems concerning 8-bit single byte characters

Mar 1, 1998 PL1 released

5.2.8. WIN1250 on Windows/ODBC

The WIN1250 character set on Windows client platforms can be used with PostgreSQL with locale support enabled.

The following should be kept in mind: