On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 08:25:07AM +0200, Giorgio Valoti wrote: > On 18/giu/08, at 03:04, Michael Fuhr wrote: > > Is the data UTF-8? If the error is 'invalid byte sequence for > > encoding "UTF8": 0xa3' then you probably need to set client_encoding > > to latin1, latin9, or win1252. > > Why?
UTF-8 has rules about what byte values can occur in sequence; violations of those rules mean that the data isn't valid UTF-8. This particular error says that the database received a byte with the value 0xa3 (163) in a sequence of bytes that wasn't valid UTF-8. The UTF-8 byte sequence for the pound sign (£) is 0xc2 0xa3. If Garry got this error (I don't know if he did; I was asking) then the byte 0xa3 must have appeared in some other sequence that wasn't valid UTF-8. The usual reason for that is that the data is in some encoding other than UTF-8. Common encodings for Western European languages are Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), Latin-9 (ISO-8859-15), and Windows-1252. All three of these encodings use a lone 0xa3 to represent the pound sign. If the data has a pound sign as 0xa3 and the database complains that it isn't part of a valid UTF-8 sequence then the data is likely to be in one of these other encodings. -- Michael Fuhr -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
