What text encoding to use?

Question

I need to setup my PostgreSQL DB's text encoding to handle non-American English characters that you'd find showing up in languages such as German, Spanish, and French. What character encoding should I use?

Answer 1

Start with UTF-8. It covers every character used at the world. Prepare your DB for world domination.

Answer 2

Unless you have a very good reason not to, use UTF-8. For the list of languages you cite, latin-1 would be acceptable (but not quite: it misses one, admittedly are, character for French: œ). Unicode is very mature now, there is little reason to reject it on principle. On the contrary, if you ever need to extend the list of languages you work with, you will be glad to have chosen an encoding that's able to deal with them.