"Oliver Elphick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I think this happens when the front-end encoding is SQL_ASCII and the > database is using UNICODE. Then, there are misunderstandings between > front-end and back-end, so that a single character with the eighth bit > set may be sent by the front-end and interpreted by the back-end as the > first half of a UNICODE two-byte character. I wondered about that, but his examples had one or more characters between the eighth-bit-set character and the '|', so this doesn't seem to explain the problem. Still, if it went away after moving to ASCII encoding, it clearly is a multibyte issue of some sort. regards, tom lane