TPSQLDatabase.Properties.CharSet

To set client encoding for the connection.

Syntax:

property CharSet: string;

Description:

The character set support in PostgreSQL allows you to store text in a variety of character sets, including single-byte character sets such as the ISO 8859 series and multiple-byte character sets such as EUC (Extended Unix Code), Unicode, and Mule internal code. All character sets can be used transparently throughout the server. The default character set is selected while initializing your PostgreSQL database cluster. It can be overridden when you create a database. So you can have multiple databases each with a different character set.

Property contains empty string if TPSQLdatabase.Connected is False. Value of CharSet property will be not saved in form files. For every session you must specify CharSet value again.

Example:

This code will set UNICODE charset for session immediately after connect.

procedure TForm1.PSQLDatabase1AfterConnect(Sender: TObject);
begin
 PSQLDatabase1.CharSet := 'UNICODE';
end;

Before PostgreSQL 7.2, 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 careful about this change.