Thomas, Andrew, Karel,

Thomas is correct: many applications which read or make CSVs will accept a 
newline if it is enclosed in a quote.   

> > I *have* seen monstrosities like fields that do not begin with the quote
> > character but then break into a quote, e.g.:
> >
> > 1,2,a,123"abc""def",6,7,8

This I have never seen.   It looks like a hackish error to me.   What 
application is it from?

Frankly, I would expect any CSV reader to error out on the above, and would be 
annoyed if it did not.

Overall, I assert again that approaching this issue through COPY enhancements 
is really not the way to go.    We should be looking at a client utility, 
like pg_import and pg_export.     The primary purpose of COPY is bulk loads 
for backup/restore, and I'm against doing a lot of tinkering which might make 
it less efficient or introduce new issues into what's currently very 
reliable.

-- 
-Josh Berkus
 Aglio Database Solutions
 San Francisco


Fri, 19 Mar 2004 11:07:29 -0800
Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Re: COPY formatting
Josh Berkus wrote:

>
>Overall, I assert again that approaching this issue through COPY enhancements 
>is really not the way to go.    We should be looking at a client utility, 
>like pg_import and pg_export.     The primary purpose of COPY is bulk loads 
>for backup/restore, and I'm against doing a lot of tinkering which might make 
>it less efficient or introduce new issues into what's currently very 
>reliable.
>
>  
>

That's not unreasonable. I floated my idea as an alternative to a much 
more radical proposal. If we decided against it we should remove the 
TODO item.

As against that, if we don't do this then I think we should embrace 
these utility programs more, possibly bringing them into the distribution.

cheers

andrew


Fri, 19 Mar 2004 16:43:56 -0500
Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
Re: COPY formatting
Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Josh Berkus wrote:
> 
> >
> >Overall, I assert again that approaching this issue through COPY enhancements 
> >is really not the way to go.    We should be looking at a client utility, 
> >like pg_import and pg_export.     The primary purpose of COPY is bulk loads 
> >for backup/restore, and I'm against doing a lot of tinkering which might make 
> >it less efficient or introduce new issues into what's currently very 
> >reliable.
> >
> >  
> >
> 
> That's not unreasonable. I floated my idea as an alternative to a much 
> more radical proposal. If we decided against it we should remove the 
> TODO item.
> 
> As against that, if we don't do this then I think we should embrace 
> these utility programs more, possibly bringing them into the distribution.

CSV seems to be the most widely requested conversion format.  Anything
else is probably a one-off job that should be done in perl or sed.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 23:00:46 -0500 (EST)
Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
Re: COPY formatting