Getting the encoding of a Postgres database

Question

I have a database  and I need to know the default encoding for the database  I want to get it from the command line

User · Answer

Because there s more than one way to skin a cat   psql -l   Shows all the database names  encoding  and more

User · Answer

From the command line   psql my database -c  SHOW SERVER ENCODING      From within psql  an SQL IDE or an API   SHOW SERVER ENCODING

User · Answer

A programmatic solution   SELECT pg encoding to char encoding  FROM pg database WHERE datname    yourdb

User · Answer

Method 1    If you re already logged in to the db server  just copy and paste this   SHOW SERVER ENCODING    Result      server encoding  -----------------   UTF8   For Client encoding     SHOW CLIENT ENCODING    Method 2   Again if you are already logged in  use this to get the list based result   l

User · Answer

tl dr    SELECT character set name  FROM information schema character sets      Standard way  information schema  From the SQL-standard schema information schema present in every database catalog  use the defined view named character sets  This approach should be portable across all standard database systems   SELECT    FROM information schema character sets      Despite the name being plural  it shows only a single row  reporting on the current database catalog     The third column is character set name      Name of the character set  currently implemented as showing the name of the database encoding

User · Answer

If you want to get database encodings   psql  -U postgres -h somehost --list   You ll see something like   List of databases            Name            Owner     Encoding ------------------------ ---------- ---------- db1                       postgres   UTF8

[postgresql] Getting the encoding of a Postgres database

Examples related to postgresql