Tadek’s Blog

While connecting to PostgreSQL using UnixODBC (from R, but this doesn’t matter) I got the following error:

[unixODBC]client encoding mismatch

It seems that there is some problem with PostgreSQL 8.1 and the encoding names: see [this post](http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-odbc/2005-09/msg00161.php) or [google](http://www.google.com/search?q=%22client+encoding+mismatch%22+postgres). It looks that UTF8 used by default with the new Postgres is not compatible with old ODBC drivers. I am not sure where the problem really is, but a _quick fix_ is to change default encoding for the user connecting to the database:

alter user SET client_encoding to LATIN1;

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2005 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Databases, Hacking, Tips&Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.