markdown/datamgmt/load/g-character-encoding.html.md.erb

---
title: Character Encoding
---

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Character encoding systems consist of a code that pairs each character from a character set with something else, such as a sequence of numbers or octets, to facilitate data stransmission and storage. HAWQ supports a variety of character sets, including single-byte character sets such as the ISO 8859 series and multiple-byte character sets such as EUC (Extended UNIX Code), UTF-8, and Mule internal code. Clients can use all supported character sets transparently, but a few are not supported for use within the server as a server-side encoding.

Data files must be in a character encoding recognized by HAWQ. Data files that contain invalid or unsupported encoding sequences encounter errors when loading into HAWQ.

**Note:** On data files generated on a Microsoft Windows operating system, run the `dos2unix` system command to remove any Windows-only characters before loading into HAWQ.