If you encode � as ISO 8859-1 and then decode as UTF-8, you will get the character U+FFFD, also known as REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, which is typically substituted instead of an invalid character. My psychic skills guess that the error message string was originally encoded as ISO 8859-1, then decoded as...

[quote user="mallard"]Actually, it's uneccissary garbage. Technically it's the UTF-8 encoding of the UTF-16 BOM, which is completely pointless and meaningless since UTF-8 only has one byte-order. The reason that notepad puts it there is because Win32's "support" of UTF...

[quote user="UpNDown"] So what's your problem? I'd die for comments like that! It's a Pascal string -- that means it has a leading length count, probably 2 bytes long (pg_char type in your example). Then the data also has a null terminator, probably actually two nulls. This makes...

[quote user="Kermos"]Oh man, I wish sites would universally accept UTF-8 for passwords. I'd just write my password in Japanese using like a short phrase with lots of Kanji and call it a day.[/quote] Japanese? Ptth. I'd write mine in Linear B, intermingled with VARIATION SELECTORs.

[quote user="fourchan"] Maybe itdoesn't just accept letters a-zA-Z, but any unicode letter instead. That would enlarge the space a lot. [/quote] Or maybe if you use Unicode letters checking will allow it, it will get mangled when saved to the database and then you will not be able to log...