On Fri, May 3, 2019 at 10:04:44AM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On thing the original poster might be missing is that the copy DELIMITER
> is used between fields, while backslash is used as an escape before a
> single character. While it might be tempting to try to redefine the
> escape character with the copy ESCAPE keyword, that keyword only works
> in CSV mode.
>
> The Postgres COPY format is very reliable and able to dump/reload _any_
> data sequence. Many commercial data dump implementations are simpler
> but are not able to be as reliable.
For example, if you are using | as a delimiter, how do you represent a
literal | in the data? You have to use an escape character before it,
and that is what backslash does, and if you have a backslash in your
data, you have to use a backslash before it too. CSV has a similar
problem with double-quotes in double-quoted strings, and this is handled
by default by using two double-quotes.
--
Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com
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