Re: MSSQL to PostgreSQL : Encoding problem

Tony Caduto <tony_caduto@amsoftwaredesign.com>

From: Tony Caduto <tony_caduto@amsoftwaredesign.com>
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Date: 2006-11-21T23:30:50Z
Lists: pgsql-general
Arnaud Lesauvage wrote:
>
>
>> I then try to import into PostgreSQL. The farther I can get is when 
>> using the UNICODE export, and importing it using a client_encoding 
>> set to UTF8 (I tried WIN1252, LATIN9, LATIN1, ...).
>> The copy then stops with an error :
>> ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xff
>> État SQL :22021
>>
>> The problematic character is the euro currency symbol.
>
>
Exporting from MS SQL server as unicode is going to give you full 
Unicode, not UTF8.  Full unicde is 2 bytes per character and UTF8 is 1, 
same as ASCII.
You will have to encode the Unicode data to UTF8

I have done this in Delphi using it's built in UTF8 encoding and 
decoding routines.   You can get a free copy of Delphi Turbo Explorer 
which includes components for MS SQL server and ODBC, so it would be 
pretty straight forward to get this working.

The actual method in Delphi is system.UTF8Encode(widestring).  This will 
encode unicode to UTF8 which is compatible with a Postgresql UTF8 database.

I am sure Perl could do it also.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Tony Caduto
AM Software Design
http://www.amsoftwaredesign.com
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