Hello,

I'm a novice using postgresql and I've hit the

ERROR: invalid multibyte character for locale

error when using the lower function. I've seen several messages in the web
citing clashes of locales and encodings as the reason for this. Now, I
can't see any of these incompatibilities in my settings so I'm lost at what
to try. My database reports:

db=> select version();
version
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PostgreSQL 8.0.7 on i486-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc-4.0.gcc-opt
(GCC) 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu1)
(1 fila)

db=> show lc_ctype;
lc_ctype
-------------
es_ES.UTF-8
(1 fila)

db=> show client_encoding;
client_encoding
-----------------
UNICODE
(1 fila)

In the shell:
$ locale
LANG=es_ES.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=es_ES:es:en_GB:en
LC_CTYPE="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

and the database is certainly UNICODE.

As you can see, the machine is configured for the spanish locale.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Jano <devnull (AT) mailinator (DOT) com> wrote:
What is the exact statememt that provokes this error?

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

Laurenz Albe wrote:

I finally tracked it down to invalid data in some records. I read somewhere
that in past versions you could insert invalid data and just get a warning,
whereas attempting to use 'lower' or similar would give an error.

I dumped the database, upgraded to 8.1 and on import I got hit by errors in
the bad records, which I corrected.

So all in all it wasn't at any point a configuration problem...

Thanks for your interest,