Tadeusz Pietraszek

© 2004-2007 Tadeusz Pietraszek

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PostgreSQL8.1 “client encoding mismatch” with ODBC

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 or google. 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 <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.

6 Responses to “PostgreSQL8.1 “client encoding mismatch” with ODBC”

  1. Phil Says:
    February 2nd, 2007 at 11:14 am

    Thanks .v.much. You saved me much hassle. You do not happen to know what is the def of old driver ?

    Cheers

    Phil

  2. tadekp Says:
    February 2nd, 2007 at 11:38 am

    I think I discussed it here: http://tadek.pietraszek.org/blog/2005/09/22/configuring-postgresql-odbc-connector/

  3. jorge Says:
    August 23rd, 2007 at 4:00 pm

    loco me sircvio mucho gracias

  4. Ismail Y Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 6:48 am

    Woww… thanks dud,,,, your post was USEFULL.. my user client_encoding was changed to SQL_ASCII, and “client encoding mismatch” error message just disappear :D

    Thank you sooo much,…

  5. Dan Says:
    March 25th, 2009 at 7:04 am

    Thank you! Problem solved!

  6. Oscar Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 3:16 pm

    me sirvió para conectarme desde el excel 2007 al postresql 8.4 en windows.. Gracias

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