On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 08:43:27AM -0500, Bill Moran wrote: > First off, it's my understanding that with SQL_ASCII "encoding", that > PostgreSQL does no checking for valid/invalid characters, per the docs: > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/multibyte.html Correct. As the documentation says, SQL_ASCII "is not so much a declaration that a specific encoding is in use, as a declaration of ignorance about the encoding." > The beginning of the dump file I am restoring has the following: > -- > -- PostgreSQL database dump > -- > > SET client_encoding = 'SQL_ASCII'; > [...] > > But when I try to pull the dump in with psql, I get the following errors: > ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xa0 > HINT: This error can also happen if the byte sequence does not match the encoding expected by the server, which is controlled by "client_encoding". > > Connecting to the database and issuing "show client_encoding" shows that > the database is indeed set to SQL_ASCII. client_encoding doesn't show the database encoding, it shows the client encoding; execute "show server_encoding" to see the database encoding. You can also use "psql -l" or "\l" from within psql to see all databases and their encodings. The error suggests that the database encoding is UTF8. > Now ... I'm expecting the server to accept any byte sequence, since we're > using SQL_ANSII, but that is (obviously) not the case. Am I missing > something obvious here? Grepping the entire dump file shows absolutely > no references to UTF8 ... so why is the server trying to validate the > byte string as UTF8? Probably because the database is UTF8 (see above). Either create the database as SQL_ASCII (see createdb's -E option) or change the client_encoding setting in the dump to whatever the encoding really is (probably LATIN1 or WIN1252 for Western European languages). -- Michael Fuhr
