How do you change the character encoding of a postgres database?

Question

I have a database that was set up with the default character set SQL_ASCII. I want to switch it to UNICODE. Is there an easy way to do that?

Answer 1

Dumping a database with a specific encoding and try to restore it on another database with a different encoding could result in data corruption. Data encoding must be set BEFORE any data is inserted into the database.

Check this : When copying any other database, the encoding and locale settings cannot be changed from those of the source database, because that might result in corrupt data.

And this : Some locale categories must have their values fixed when the database is created. You can use different settings for different databases, but once a database is created, you cannot change them for that database anymore. LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE are these categories. They affect the sort order of indexes, so they must be kept fixed, or indexes on text columns would become corrupt. (But you can alleviate this restriction using collations, as discussed in Section 22.2.) The default values for these categories are determined when initdb is run, and those values are used when new databases are created, unless specified otherwise in the CREATE DATABASE command.

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I would rather rebuild everything from the begining properly with a correct local encoding on your debian OS as explained here :

su root

Reconfigure your local settings :

dpkg-reconfigure locales

Choose your locale (like for instance for french in Switzerland : fr_CH.UTF8)

Uninstall and clean properly postgresql :

apt-get --purge remove postgresql\*
rm -r /etc/postgresql/
rm -r /etc/postgresql-common/
rm -r /var/lib/postgresql/
userdel -r postgres
groupdel postgres

Re-install postgresql :

aptitude install postgresql-9.1 postgresql-contrib-9.1 postgresql-doc-9.1

Now any new database will be automatically be created with correct encoding, LC_TYPE (character classification), and LC_COLLATE (string sort order).