I had a similar issue for my project. Encoding of udd is SQL_ASCII according to: https://wiki.debian.org/UltimateDebianDatabase/Hacking I used recode. It looks like: zcat dump.sql.gz | recode iso-8859-1..u8 | sed s/SET\ client_encoding\ =\ \'SQL_ASCII\'\;/SET\ client_encoding\ =\ \'UTF8\'\;/ | psql -q myudd Not sure it is the perfect solution but it helps in my case. Raphaël Walther