Re: Trouble with UTF-8 data

Janine Sisk <janine(at)furfly(dot)net> writes:
> But I'm still getting this error when loading the data into the new
> database:

> ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xeda7a1

The reason PG doesn't like this sequence is that it corresponds to
a Unicode "surrogate pair" code point, which is not supposed to
ever appear in UTF-8 representation --- surrogate pairs are a kluge for
UTF-16 to deal with Unicode code points of more than 16 bits. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16

I think you need a version of iconv that knows how to fold surrogate
pairs into proper UTF-8 form. It might also be that the data is
outright broken --- if this sequence isn't followed by another
surrogate-pair sequence then it isn't valid Unicode by anybody's
interpretation.

7.2.x unfortunately didn't check Unicode data carefully, and would
have let this data pass without comment ...

regards, tom lane