Getting the encoding of a Postgres database

Question

From the command line:

psql my_database -c 'SHOW SERVER_ENCODING'

---

From within psql, an SQL IDE or an API:

SHOW SERVER_ENCODING;

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 

A programmatic solution:

SELECT pg_encoding_to_char(encoding) FROM pg_database WHERE datname = 'yourdb';

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