Converting a Postgresql database from SQL_ASCII, containing mixed encoging types, to UTF-8

Question

I have a postgresql database I would like to convert to UTF-8.

The problem is that it is currently SQL_ASCII, so hasn\'t been doing any kind of encoding conversion o

Answer 1

This is exactly the problem that Encoding::FixLatin was written to solve*.

If you install the Perl module then you'll also get the fix_latin command-line utility which you can use like this:

pg_restore -O dump_file | fix_latin | psql -d database

Read of the 'Limitations' section of the documentation to understand how it works.

[*] Note I'm assuming that when you say ISO-8859-x you mean ISO-8859-1 and when you say CP125x you mean CP1252 - because the mix of ASCII, UTF-8, Latin-1 and WinLatin-1 is a common case. But if you really do have a mixture of eastern and western encodings then sorry but you're screwed :-(