Getting the encoding of a Postgres database

Question

I have a database, and I need to know the default encoding for the database. I want to get it from the command line.

Answer 1

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