[GENERAL] loading file with en dash character into postgres 9.6.1 database

The server and client encoding are both set to UTF8, and according to this http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2013/index.htm en dash is a valid UTF8 character, but when running a script with insert statement with en dash character in it, I got the error below.

mydb=> select name, setting from pg_settings where name like '%encoding%';

      name       | setting

-----------------+---------

client_encoding | UTF8

server_encoding | UTF8

mydb=> \i activity_type.lst

psql:activity_type.lst:379: ERROR:  invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x96

If I set client_encoding to WIN1252, the same file will be run ok and records inserted in, but afterwards the en dash character showed up as “û”, instead of the en dash character “–”

mydb=> show client_encoding;

client_encoding

-----------------

WIN1252

I created a database with WIN1252 encoding so both server and client encoding are WIN1252, loaded the same file in, en dash character still showed up as “û”(actually that is on a windows box, on a linux box the character didn’t show up at all), so the client setting still makes a difference, even though client_encoding showed the same value.

Is there any way I will be able to load the en dash character into the postgresql database as is? I had worked around it by editing the input file to replace en dash with a plain dash, but that’s quite some manual work each time when a new dump is generated from an oracle database with WE8MSWIN1252 characterset.

Thanks,

Patricia