On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 11:28:36AM -0400, Roland Glenn McIntosh wrote: > > The Euro symbol is unicode value 0x20AC. UTF-8 encoding is a way of representing > most unicode characters in two bytes, and most latin characters in one byte. More precisely, UTF-8 encodes ASCII characters in one byte. All other latin-1 characters take 2 bytes IIRC, with the rest taking up to 4 bytes.
> I don't know why my "20" byte turned into two bytes of E2 and 82. Haven't got the spec handy, but UTF-8 uses the most-significant bit(s) of each byte as a "continuation" field. If the upper bit is zero, the char is a plain 7-bit ASCII value. If it's 1, the byte is part of a multibyte sequence with a few most-significant bits indicating the sequence's length and the byte's position in it (IIRC it's something like a countdown to the end of the sequence). In a nutshell, you can't just take bits away from your Unicode value and call it UTF-8; it's a variable-length encoding and it needs some extra room for the length information to go. Furthermore, I don't think the Euro symbol is in latin-1 at all. It was added in latin-9 (iso 8859-15) and so it's not likely to have gotten a retroactive spot in the bottom 256 character values. Hence it will take UTF-8 more bytes to encode it. > Furthermore, I was under the impression that a UTF-8 encoding of the Euro sign only > took two bytes. Corroborating this assumption, upon dumping that table with pg_dump > and examining the resultant file in a hex editor, I see this in that character > position: AC 20 How does that "corroborate the assumption?" You're looking at the Unicode value now, in a fixed-length 16-bit encoding. > I did try the '\0x20AC' method, and '\0x20\0xAC' without success. > It's worth noting that the field I'm inserting into is an SQL_ASCII field, and I'm > reading my UTF-8 string out of it like this, via JDBC: You can't fit UTF-8 into ASCII. UTF-8 is an eight-byte encoding; ASCII is a 7-bit character set. Jeroen ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: most folks find a random_page_cost between 1 or 2 is ideal
