22P05ERRORTier 2 — Caution✅ HIGH confidence

untranslatable character

Category: Data ExceptionVersions: All Postgres versions

What this means

SQLSTATE 22P05 is a Postgres-specific error raised when a character in the input cannot be translated from the client encoding to the server (database) encoding. This is more specific than 22021 — it applies when the character exists in the source encoding but has no equivalent in the target encoding.

Why it happens

1A Unicode character exists in the client data but has no equivalent codepoint in the server encoding (e.g., a Unicode emoji in a LATIN-1 database)
2Encoding conversion table does not include the specific character

How to reproduce

Inserting emoji into a LATIN-1 database from a UTF-8 client.

trigger — this will ERROR

-- client_encoding = UTF8, database encoding = LATIN1
INSERT INTO messages (body) VALUES ('Hello 🌍');

ERROR: character with byte sequence 0xf0 0x9f 0x8c 0x8d in encoding "UTF8" has no equivalent in encoding "LATIN1"

Fix 1: Use a Unicode-capable database encoding (UTF-8)

When designing a new database that will handle multilingual or emoji content.

fix

CREATE DATABASE mydb ENCODING 'UTF8' LC_COLLATE 'en_US.UTF-8' LC_CTYPE 'en_US.UTF-8';

Why this works

UTF-8 can represent all Unicode codepoints, eliminating untranslatable character errors.

Fix 2: Strip or replace untranslatable characters before inserting

When the database encoding cannot be changed.

fix

-- Remove characters outside LATIN-1 range in the application layer before sending to Postgres

Why this works

Pre-process the string in the application to remove or replace characters not representable in the target encoding.

What not to do

✗

Set client_encoding to LATIN-1 to hide UTF-8 characters

Why it's wrong: This causes Postgres to misinterpret the bytes rather than converting them, leading to silent data corruption.

Sources

📚 Official docs: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/errcodes-appendix.html

📚 Feature docs: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/multibyte.html

🔧 Source ref: Class 22 — Data Exception (Postgres-specific)

Confidence assessment

✅ HIGH confidence

Postgres-specific error for encoding translation failures. Stable across versions.