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up vote 33 down vote favorite
9

I have a database that I need to know what's the default encoding for the database

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4 Answers 4

up vote 36 down vote accepted

psql my_database -c 'SHOW SERVER_ENCODING'

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3  
If you're already logged in and viewing a database after a psql ... show server_encoding; works fine as well. –  Meredith Jul 11 '13 at 18:00
up vote 15 down vote

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
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up vote 13 down vote

A programmatic solution:

SELECT pg_encoding_to_char(encoding) FROM pg_database WHERE datname = 'yourdb';
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up vote 13 down vote

If you're already logged in, this will also work

SHOW SERVER_ENCODING;

Result:

server_encoding

UTF8

For Client encoding :

SHOW CLIENT_ENCODING;

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