Re: loading file with en dash character into postgres 9.6.1 database

Tom Lane wrote:
> "Hu, Patricia" <Patricia(dot)Hu(at)finra(dot)org> writes:
>> The server and client encoding are both set to UTF8, and according to this
>> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2013/index.htm en dash is a valid UTF8
>> character, but when running a script with insert statement with en dash character in it, I
>> got the error below.
>> psql:activity_type.lst:379: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x96
>
> Well, that certainly isn't valid UTF8, so your script file isn't in UTF8.
>
>> If I set client_encoding to WIN1252, the same file will be run ok
>> but afterwards the en dash character showed up as "û", instead of the en dash character
>> "-"
>
> This indicates that your terminal program does *not* think its encoding
> is WIN1252. Having loaded that script file, you need to revert
> client_encoding to whatever your terminal program is using, or non-ASCII
> characters are going to be displayed wrong.
>
> A bit of poking around suggests that your terminal may be operating
> with code page 437 or similar, as 0x96 is "û" in that encoding ---
> according to Wikipedia, at least:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
> I don't think Postgres supports that as a client_encoding setting,
> so one way or another you're going to need to switch the terminal
> program's character set setting.

Running "chcp 1252" in your Windows console before starting psql
should do the trick.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe