untranslatable_character requested character too large for encoding: N — 22P05

Symptoms

A character (often produced by chr() or a conversion) cannot be represented in the database/client encoding. PostgreSQL raises SQLSTATE 22P05 (untranslatable_character).

• The requested code point exceeds what the encoding supports.
• Common when generating characters in a non-UTF8 encoding.
• Conversions between encodings can also trigger it.

What the server log shows

ERROR:  requested character too large for encoding: 1114112

Why PostgreSQL raises this — what the manual says

As Section 23.3 Character Set Support explains:

Functions such as chr() map a numeric code point to a character in the database encoding; a value larger than the largest code point the encoding can represent has no valid character and is rejected as too large for the encoding.

Each encoding supports a defined set of code points. When a requested character is outside that set (or has no equivalent during conversion), PostgreSQL cannot encode it and reports 22P05.

Common causes

• chr() with a code point too large for the encoding.
• Converting text containing characters absent from the target encoding.
• A non-UTF8 database asked to store a high Unicode code point.

How to fix it

1. Use a UTF-8 database/encoding to support the full Unicode range.
2. Validate code points before calling chr() in non-UTF8 encodings.
3. Transliterate or strip unsupported characters during conversion.

Related & next steps

• SQLSTATE 22P05 — Untranslatable Character (full reference)
• Message: invalid byte sequence for encoding
• Glossary: Encoding

Reference: PostgreSQL 18 Section 24.3 “Character Set Support”.