Server/Client Encoding Errors

APseudoUtopia wrote:

I'm having some problems when inserting special characters into a
column. Here's the table:

----------------------------------
Table "public.users_history_ip"
Column | Type | Modifiers
------------+-----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------
id | bigint | not null default nextval('users_history_ip_id_seq'::regclass)
userid | integer | not null
ip | inet | not null
hostname | character varying(512) | not null
geoip_info | character varying(512) | not null
start_time | timestamp without time zone | not null
last_seen | timestamp without time zone | not null
type | ip_history_type | not null
Indexes:
"users_history_ip_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)
Foreign-key constraints:
"users_history_ip_userid_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (userid) REFERENCES users_main(id) ON DELETE CASCADE
----------------------------------

I'm trying to insert information into the geoip_info column. Here's
some of the information that I'm trying to insert, and the errors:

'Portugal, 09, Vila Real De Santo António'
ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xf36e696f

'Norway, 08, Ålesund'
ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xc56c

'Portugal, 04, Vila Nova De Famalicão'
ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xe36f2c

The locale on the server is "C" and the encoding is "UTF8". I thought
the UTF8 encoding would allow characters like this? Why is it
disallowing it?
Note, the GeoIP info is generated automatically by a module, so I am
unable to determine exactly what characters will be returned.

The UTF8 encoding allows you to store the characters ó, Å and ã, but
you have to encode them correctly.

Judging from the error messages, you have set your client_encoding to UTF8,
but feed data that are encoded in LATIN1 or WIN1252.

If you feed the client LATIN1 data, set client_encoding to LATIN1 so
that PostgreSQL can correctly convert the characters to UTF-8.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe