Is it possible to UTF8 decode a host variable to ISO-8859-1 in a program C ?
Sure, lots of libraries do it. Look at libiconv
for example.
Is it possible to say in the .pgc file : Postgres I want UTF8-decode values ?
Trivially. Set client_encoding
to iso-8859-1
or whatever your local encoding is. You can do this with libpq functions; ecpg may have its own equivalents, not sure.