Problem with 'recode' - Emergency!!

[santorini]

Hi, I'm new to Linux and also this forum.


I have a bunch of .txt files on a remote server which contain tabled information (column names, entry values, comma separated). I use putty to connect to the server and I am supposed to create a table for each file.

When I use 'copy' statement like this:

\copy table1 from '/something/file.txt' delimiter as ','

I get the below error:

ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xff
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".


The client encoding for the server is "UTF-8" (I used 'show client_encoding' to figure it out)

The 'file.txt' encoding is 'data' (When I type: file file.txt, I get the word "data")

I tried to change the encoding of 'file.txt' to 'UTF-8" using:

"recode UTF-8 file.txt"


But I received:


"recode: file.txt failed: Invalid input in step `UTF-8..CHAR"


Also when I used:


"recode data..UTF-8 file.txt"


I got :


No way to recode from `data' to `UTF-8'
recode: Request `data..UTF-8' is erroneous




Can anybody of you guys please help me. I still am not very clear as what the real problem is...


Thanks in advance.

[tpl]

welcome to the forum

"putty" is a windows program: how can we help you with linux?

[santorini]

welcome to the forum

"putty" is a windows program: how can we help you with linux?

Sorry.

Forgot to say that I use Putty to connect to a remote server. The server is running in SunOS. When I use Putty and log in, I get the 'bash' prompt and can use linux commands. The database I connect to (and have to create tables in is a POSTGRES database)

Any ideas?