0xc3 error Text Search Windows French

I have a feeling that an issue I'm running into is related to this:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2008-06/msg00113.php

On Windows XP running PgAdmin III 1.8.4 against either PostgreSQL
8.3.0 or 8.3.3 DB, when attempting to do a:

select * from ts_debug('french', 'catalogue');

getting the following error:

ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xc3
HINT: This error can also happen if the byte sequence does not match
the encoding expected by the server, which is controlled by
"client_encoding".
CONTEXT: SQL function "ts_debug" statement 1

I have replaced the french.stop file with the one from the snowball
web site (http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/french/stemmer.html)
to see if that would make any difference. But the same issue. I have
also attempted to load the French Hunspell dictionary from the Open
Office web site
(http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries), using the
following command:

CREATE TEXT SEARCH DICTIONARY public.fr_ispell (
TEMPLATE = pg_catalog.ispell,
DictFile = fr_FR,
AffFile = fr_FR,
StopWords = french
);

But getting the same error. I have successfully loaded the English
and Arabic dictionaries and an Arabic stop file I sourced from
elsewhere, and they work fine with the various text search function
calls, so it appears to be specifically related to a French character
occurring in the stop file and the dictionaries. To use the French OO
dictionaries, I had to convert them from an ISO-8859-15 character set
encoding to UTF-8. As it still had the same result as with the
packaged stop file when converting on Windows, I downloaded them and
converted the encoding on a Linux machine before copying them across
to windows to see if that would help, but it didn't.

However, if I run the ts_debug('french', 'catalogue'); against a Linux
version of PostgreSQL 8.3.1, it works fine. I have not tried version
8.3.1 on Windows. While there are a lot more combinations to exhaust
before I can make a categorical statement, at this stage it appears to
be pointing towards an issue with the UTF-8 parser of PostgreSQL on
Windows.

Is this an outstanding defect, or is there something that I'm doing
wrong in my environment? I have attempted to find anything related on
the Internet, but other than the introductory reference, I have not
found anything, which for what I would imagine to be, of the size of
the French user base surprises me. Hence, I'm thinking that perhaps
it may be something in my environment causing the issue. If others
could also reproduce the error on their XP machines, that would
indicate that the issue was not something specific just to me.

At this stage, it is not that important to me, as I'm just playing
around with text search for my own curiosity and French was just a
language I have randomly picked, along with Arabic (for which I'm
lacking a snowball stemmer). I don't actually read, much less speak
those languages. However, it would still be nice to have them working.

An additional related topic. OO have for some languages, thesaurus
files which are not in the same format as supported by Pg Full Text
Search. Are there any plans to support the OO thesaurus file
formats? They also have hyphenation files. Are there any plans to
extend the current dictionary files to include hyphenation rules as
captured in the OO hyphenation files? I'm not sure how, if at all
hyphenation rules would improve on indexing and searches, but I
thought as the files exist, I would pose the question.

Thanks,

Andy

One additional aspect. I just ran the create text search dictionary
command without the stopfile declaration using the OO dictionaries,
and it worked fine with the select ts_lexize('public.fr_ispell',
'catalogue'); command executing with no problems. However, after
creating an associated catalogue based on a copy of the
pg_catalog.french catalogue, calls to ts_debug against my custom
French config result in the 0xc3 error. So it is looking like the
problem is restricted to the parsing of the stop file.
I ran through the other out of the box supplied stemmers, which I have
not touched in anyway and it is also occurring with the portuguese
catalogue.

Cheers

Andy

Andrew wrote:

I have a feeling that an issue I'm running into is related to this:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2008-06/msg00113.php

On Windows XP running PgAdmin III 1.8.4 against either PostgreSQL
8.3.0 or 8.3.3 DB, when attempting to do a:

select * from ts_debug('french', 'catalogue');

getting the following error:

ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xc3
HINT: This error can also happen if the byte sequence does not match
the encoding expected by the server, which is controlled by
"client_encoding".
CONTEXT: SQL function "ts_debug" statement 1

I have replaced the french.stop file with the one from the snowball
web site
(http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/french/stemmer.html) to see
if that would make any difference. But the same issue. I have also
attempted to load the French Hunspell dictionary from the Open Office
web site (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries),
using the following command:

CREATE TEXT SEARCH DICTIONARY public.fr_ispell (
TEMPLATE = pg_catalog.ispell,
DictFile = fr_FR,
AffFile = fr_FR,
StopWords = french
);

But getting the same error. I have successfully loaded the English
and Arabic dictionaries and an Arabic stop file I sourced from
elsewhere, and they work fine with the various text search function
calls, so it appears to be specifically related to a French character
occurring in the stop file and the dictionaries. To use the French
OO dictionaries, I had to convert them from an ISO-8859-15 character
set encoding to UTF-8. As it still had the same result as with the
packaged stop file when converting on Windows, I downloaded them and
converted the encoding on a Linux machine before copying them across
to windows to see if that would help, but it didn't.

However, if I run the ts_debug('french', 'catalogue'); against a
Linux version of PostgreSQL 8.3.1, it works fine. I have not tried
version 8.3.1 on Windows. While there are a lot more combinations to
exhaust before I can make a categorical statement, at this stage it
appears to be pointing towards an issue with the UTF-8 parser of
PostgreSQL on Windows.

Is this an outstanding defect, or is there something that I'm doing
wrong in my environment? I have attempted to find anything related
on the Internet, but other than the introductory reference, I have
not found anything, which for what I would imagine to be, of the size
of the French user base surprises me. Hence, I'm thinking that
perhaps it may be something in my environment causing the issue. If
others could also reproduce the error on their XP machines, that
would indicate that the issue was not something specific just to me.

At this stage, it is not that important to me, as I'm just playing
around with text search for my own curiosity and French was just a
language I have randomly picked, along with Arabic (for which I'm
lacking a snowball stemmer). I don't actually read, much less speak
those languages. However, it would still be nice to have them working.

An additional related topic. OO have for some languages, thesaurus
files which are not in the same format as supported by Pg Full Text
Search. Are there any plans to support the OO thesaurus file
formats? They also have hyphenation files. Are there any plans to
extend the current dictionary files to include hyphenation rules as
captured in the OO hyphenation files? I'm not sure how, if at all
hyphenation rules would improve on indexing and searches, but I
thought as the files exist, I would pose the question.

Thanks,

Andy