Folks >From another system (non postgres) as data gets changed we collect in the form like below into a named pipe which is tailed into psql -U csidba -d repdb -hrephost insert into foo (mydata) values ('{"mail_stop": "" , "city_id": "Garching bei M?nchen"}'); And got a failure ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xfc insert into foo (mydata) values ('{"mail_stop": "" , "city_id": "Garching bei M?nchen"}'); Problem is said system to convert to UTF8 is nicely put a huge amount of effort and we don't have the resources anyway at this point This is not a copy, just a tailed named pipe into psql Is there any trick/way I can shove this data into Postgres ? I really don't care whether it read "Garching bei M?nchen" or "Garching bei Mfoonchen" Thanks — Armand