Hi Alvaro, thanks for your reply!
Alvaro Herrera wrote:
psql:db_backup.sql:1548: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UNICODE": 0xe12020
CONTEXT: COPY country, line 5, column namespanish: "Canad? "
Hmm. The sequence looks like latin1 interpreted as utf8. This seems the inverse of the problem reported (and solved) here
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-es-ayuda/2005-03/msg00491.php
Maybe you should try sticking a
SET client_encoding TO latin1;
at the beggining of the dump file.
One thing worries me, though. With all of the previous versions of postgresql (I think when we started to use it in our system, it was version 7.1), I have never worried about any encoding issues. Our users are mostly Spanish-speaking, and they register to our system via web-based interfaces; virtually 100% of them use Windows (and perhaps most of them Windows in Spanish, with a Spanish keyboard).
So, our system (CGI's written in C++ running on a Linux server) simply takes whatever the user gives (properly validated and escaped) and throws it in the database. We've never encountered any problem (well, or perhaps it's the opposite? Perhaps we've always been living with the problem without realizing it?)
I worry now that if I needed to put a set client_encoding statement to make the insert or COPY statements work, does that mean that I should modify each and every program that I have that interacts with the database, and add a "set client encoding" statement before whatever other statement(s) we execute?
Or is this client_encoding setting something that gets attached to the database (or the tables) itself?
Where can I find more documentation on these issues? I'd like to get a deeper understanding, to avoid any future problems.
Why are you using CHAR(n) fields anyway? It should probably be better if you used VARCHAR(n) ...
Una de esas cosas que pasan hasta en las mejores familias ;-)
(I was also surprised when noticing the bunch of spaces at the end -- I would have thought that we were using varchars in fields like that one)
Thanks again!
Cheers,
Carlos
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