Identifier or string

Use system encoding (empty string)

Can be set as a temporary option only, for the duration of the current connection.

This option is used to specify the encoding to use when reading or writing files. It cannot be set permanently. The default encoding is the code page for the platform you are running on. On English Windows computers, the default code page is 1252.

When running Interactive SQL, the encoding that is used by the INPUT, OUTPUT, or READ statement is determined in the following order:

If the input file was created using the OUTPUT statement and an encoding was specified, then the same ENCODING clause should be specified on the INPUT statement. See OUTPUT statement [Interactive SQL].

For more information about code pages and character sets, see International language and character set tasks.

• READ statement [Interactive SQL]
• INPUT statement [Interactive SQL]
• OUTPUT statement [Interactive SQL]
• Understanding character sets
• SET OPTION statement [Interactive SQL]

Set the encoding to UTF-16 (for reading Unicode files):

SET TEMPORARY OPTION default_isql_encoding = 'UTF-16';

Set the encoding to cp437 I (Windows English OEM):

SET TEMPORARY OPTION default_isql_encoding = 'cp437';