Re: UTF8 encoding problem

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 08:25:07AM +0200, Giorgio Valoti wrote:
> On 18/giu/08, at 03:04, Michael Fuhr wrote:
> > Is the data UTF-8? If the error is 'invalid byte sequence for
> > encoding "UTF8": 0xa3' then you probably need to set client_encoding
> > to latin1, latin9, or win1252.
>
> Why?

UTF-8 has rules about what byte values can occur in sequence;
violations of those rules mean that the data isn't valid UTF-8.
This particular error says that the database received a byte with
the value 0xa3 (163) in a sequence of bytes that wasn't valid UTF-8.

The UTF-8 byte sequence for the pound sign (£) is 0xc2 0xa3. If
Garry got this error (I don't know if he did; I was asking) then
the byte 0xa3 must have appeared in some other sequence that wasn't
valid UTF-8. The usual reason for that is that the data is in some
encoding other than UTF-8.

Common encodings for Western European languages are Latin-1
(ISO-8859-1), Latin-9 (ISO-8859-15), and Windows-1252. All three
of these encodings use a lone 0xa3 to represent the pound sign. If
the data has a pound sign as 0xa3 and the database complains that
it isn't part of a valid UTF-8 sequence then the data is likely to
be in one of these other encodings.

--
Michael Fuhr