Character with byte sequence 0x9d in encoding 'WIN1252' has no equivalent in encoding 'UTF8'

Question

I am reading a csv file in my sql script and copying its data into a postgre sql table. The line of code is below :

\copy participants_2013 from 'C:/Users/Acrotrend/Desktop/mip_sahil/mip/reelportdata/Participating_Individual_Extract_Report_MIPJunior_2013_160414135957.Csv' with CSV delimiter ',' quote '"' HEADER; 

I am getting following error : character with byte sequence 0x9d in encoding 'WIN1252' has no equivalent in encoding 'UTF8'.

Can anyone help me with what the cause of this issue and how can I resolve it?

Answer 1

The problem is that 0x9D is not a valid byte value in WIN1252. There's a table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252

The problem may be that you are importing a UTF-8 file and postgresql is defaulting to Windows-1252 (which I believe is the default on many windows systems).

You need to change the character set on your windows command line before running the script with chcp. Or in postgresql you can:

SET CLIENT_ENCODING TO 'utf8'; 

Before importing the file.

Answer 2

Simply specify encoding 'UTF-8' as the encoding in the \copy command, e.g. (I broke it into two lines for readability but keep it all on the same line):

\copy dest_table from 'C:/src-data.csv'                   (format csv, header true, delimiter ',', encoding 'UTF8'); 

More details:

The problem is that the Client Encoding is set to WIN1252, most likely because it is running on Windows machine but the file has a UTF-8 character in it.

You can check the Client Encoding with

SHOW client_encoding;   client_encoding ----------------- WIN1252