Hi all, Got the following thing : ≠, ≤, and ≥ store in the database as question marks according to one of my developers. I have postgres installed on both MAC OS X and Centos 7 All locale on both point to UTF8 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL= insert into jt1 values ('≤') ; This I can run either copy/paste which is case 1 (which does reproduce the developer issue) , or have it in an sql script which case 2 On OS X: - case 1 fails testdb=# insert into jt1 values ('??') ; ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xe2 0xa4 0x27 Note that at paste time ≤ changed in ?? - case 2 is fine - echo -n '≤' |hexdump -C 00000000 e2 89 a4 |...| 00000003 On Centos: - Both cases are fine - echo -n '≤' |hexdump -C 00000000 e2 89 a4 |...| 00000003 http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2264/index.htm UTF-8 (hex) 0xE2 0x89 0xA4 (e289a4) So to me the representation is fine in all cases. Also in all cases my encoding is UTF8. I am trying to understand in OS X where does the change occur ? What is causing the failure ? In the bigger picture a developer complained about this failure and I am fairly sure this is not a postgres issue but I need to prove it Many thanks for help -- Armand