The following bug has been logged online:

Bug reference: 2685
Logged by: Sergiy Vyshnevetskiy
Email address: serg (AT) vostok (DOT) net
PostgreSQL version: 8.1
Operating system: FreeBSD-6 stable
Description: Wrong charset of server messages on client [PATCH]
Details:

DESCRIPTION:

PostgreSQL backend uses gettext() to localize its messages. The charset of
localized messages is determined by LC_CTYPE by default.

Then the message is processed through sprintf-like mechanism (with database
data as possible arguments) and fed to send_message_to_frontend(), that
converts data from _database_charset_(!) to client charset.

If LC_CTYPE is not the same as (at least binary compatible to) database
charset, then client gets garbage characters in server messages. If database
charset is UTF-8, then cluster may recusively generate "invalid byte
sequence for encoding" errors till it fills up
errordata[ERRORDATA_STACK_SIZE], then it panics.

SOLUTION:

Convert server messages to database charset.

PATCH:

--- src/backend/utils/mb/mbutils.c.o0 Tue Oct 10 11:51:13 2006

+++ src/backend/utils/mb/mbutils.c Tue Oct 10 11:49:22 2006

@@ -615,6 +615,7 @@

DatabaseEncoding = &pg_enc2name_tbl[encoding];

Assert(DatabaseEncoding->encoding == encoding);

#ifdef USE_ICU

+
bind_textdomain_codeset("postgres",(&pg_enc2ianana me_tbl[encoding])->name);

ucnv_setDefaultName((&pg_enc2iananame_tbl[encoding])->name);

#endif

}




This, however, uncovers another bug: PostgreSQL dumps the messages into
stderr/syslog as-is, without converting database data from database charset
to charset from LC_MESSAGES. After this patch it will do so with message
text too. The fix should be trivial - set up a conversion from database
charset to server charset. I will post a patch for it later.

NOTE:

I used pg_enc2iananame_tbl instead of pg_enc2name_tbl, because gettext
doesn't accept many

Possible TODO:
Change PostgreSQL charset names to IANA-standard names.

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"Sergiy Vyshnevetskiy" <serg (AT) vostok (DOT) net> writes:
This has been discussed before:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql...8/msg00245.php

The magic pg_enc2iananame_tbl[] you reference in your patch does not exist,
and if it did exist it wouldn't work on all platforms, since encoding
names aren't sufficiently well standardized :-(

I'm quite unconvinced that that's a bug. If we tried to do a conversion
here, it would be trivial to set up denials of service for logging ---
just include a character in a comment in your SQL command that cannot be
converted to the LC_MESSAGES character set.

regards, tom lane

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Sergiy Vyshnevetskiy <serg (AT) vostok (DOT) net> writes:
You're missing my point, which is that non-ICU locale support doesn't
necessarily recognize the same encoding names. We would have done this
years ago if we had a solution to that problem.

regards, tom lane

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