UTF-8 Characters not well supported in S3 Copy Operation

Columns with a CHAR data type only accept single-byte UTF-8 characters, up to byte value 127, or 7F hex, which is also the ASCII character set. VARCHAR columns accept multibyte UTF-8 characters, to a maximum of four bytes. For more information, see Character types.

I tested loading both the characters you provided as examples é using copy command and am successfully able to load them into varchar column. You cannot load them into a column with char datatype.

If a line in your load data contains a character that is not valid for the column data type, COPY returns an error and logs a row in the STL_LOAD_ERRORS system log table with error number 1220. The ERR_REASON field includes the byte sequence, in hex, for the invalid character.

An alternative to fixing not valid characters in your load data is to replace the not valid characters during the load process. To replace not valid UTF-8 characters, specify the ACCEPTINVCHARS option with the COPY command. If the ACCEPTINVCHARS option is set, the character you specify replaces the code point. If the ACCEPTINVCHARS option isn't set, Amazon Redshift accepts the characters as valid UTF-8. For more information, see ACCEPTINVCHARS.

The following list of code points are valid UTF-8, COPY operations don't return an error if the ACCEPTINVCHARS option is not set. However, these code points are not valid characters. You can use the ACCEPTINVCHARS option to replace a code point with a character that you specify. These code points include the range of values from 0xFDD0 to 0xFDEF and values up to 0x10FFFF, ending with FFFE or FFFF:

0xFFFE, 0x1FFFE, 0x2FFFE, …, 0xFFFFE, 0x10FFFE

0xFFFF, 0x1FFFF, 0x2FFFF, …, 0xFFFFF, 0x10FFFF

The following example shows the error reason when COPY attempts to load UTF-8 character e0 a1 c7a4 into a CHAR column.

Multibyte character not supported for CHAR (Hint: Try using VARCHAR). Invalid char: e0 a1 c7a4

If the error is related to a VARCHAR data type, the error reason includes an error code as well as the not valid UTF-8 hex sequence. The following example shows the error reason when COPY attempts to load UTF-8 a4 into a VARCHAR field.

String contains invalid or unsupported UTF-8 codepoints. Bad UTF-8 hex sequence: a4 (error 3)

The following lists the descriptions and suggested workarounds for VARCHAR load errors. If one of these errors occurs, replace the character with a valid UTF-8 code sequence or remove the character.