Hi, FYI, I had the exact same problem earlier this week, while building a new Debian Stable (Wheezy) server where postgresql version is 9.1.9-1 for a database containing accented characters. Steps where : pg_dump of a database encoded in LATIN9 on the old machine which uses the fr_FR@euro locale use iconv to convert the dump file to utf-8 on the new machine where locale is fr_FR.UTF-8 edit dump file, change : SET client_encoding = 'LATIN9'; to: SET client_encoding = 'UTF-8'; recreate db on the new machine with the dump file The database is used in a mod_perl application accessed via a navigator, similar to the one in my sig. While accented characters coming from the perl code were fine, all those out of the database would appear garbled (like : @Å ) and update queries were impossible, generating the same error message as the OP (ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x9c) When using ssh, I had to manually change my client encoding to UTF-8 (my workstation uses LATIN9) for the data to appear correctly on the screen. The machine had to go into production, so I finally gave up on UTF-8 and used LATIN9 as the locale. I tried reproducing the problem with 9.1 on a stock Debian Squeeze machine using backports. On this machine, accented characters would appear garbled, but update queries were possible. -- Salutations, Vincent Veyron http://marica.fr/ Gestion des contrats, des contentieux juridiques et des sinistres d'assurance -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general