Getting the encoding of a Postgres database

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 

From the command line:

psql my_database -c 'SHOW SERVER_ENCODING'

---

From within psql, an SQL IDE or an API:

SHOW SERVER_ENCODING;