Silent failure attempting to read invalid characters from Postgres

[dbaston]

I've been using ogr2ogr to write MapInfo TAB files from PostGIS. I've been prefacing my ogr2ogr commands with SET PGCLIENTENCODING=LATIN1, as recommended by the Postgresql driver page. This works great if all characters can be encoded in Latin-1. If the database contains UTF8 characters that cannot be encoded in Latin-1, ogr2ogr will write an empty TAB file without producing an error message, and will return zero. I would expect the process to fail or at least produce a warning.