OK, I'm mailing the list the results of my problem so future people can find it. The error was ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xa2 with many different types of 0x... lines. The problem was indeed a bug, but one that sat between the keyboard and screen (that is, me), not with the COPY command. I didn't read the COPY docs well enough, in there it clearly states that a backslash followed by digits will be interpreted as a character with that numeric code (in the table). As the data I was importing contained addresses, it had a unit number and street number, like this; 2\554, so this was being interpreted as the number 2 followed by a character represented by \554 which was an invalid sequence and so rightly so, Copy failed and complained about an invalid char sequence. Going through the data set and replacing the backslashes with forward slashes (which works in my case) or if you need to be non destructive, replcaing the single backslash with a double backslash, handles the problem. Sorry all for the noise. Mikel -- http://lindsaar.net/ Rails, RSpec and Life blog....
