Re: How To: LARGE html text or csv file COPY FROM? - Mailing list pgsql-admin

From Greg Smith
Subject Re: How To: LARGE html text or csv file COPY FROM?
Date
Msg-id 4C91724C.4040802@2ndquadrant.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to How To: LARGE html text or csv file COPY FROM?  (Lou Picciano <loupicciano@comcast.net>)
List pgsql-admin
Lou Picciano wrote:p { margin: 0; }
Both errors above make sense to me; COPY is running into either a cr or a tab character in each case.

Even though they might seem very similar at first, text mode and CSV mode work very differently here.  To quote TFM at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-copy.html , which covers all this if you dig into it enough:

"CSV mode will both recognize and produce CSV files with quoted values containing embedded carriage returns and line feeds. Thus the files are not strictly one line per table row like text-mode files."

So as long as the field is quoted, you can have a CR or tab in the middle.

In text mode:  "the following characters must be preceded by a backslash if they appear as part of a column value: backslash itself, newline, carriage return, and the current delimiter character."  Text mode will therefore require escaping everything on that list.

So if this is close to being importable in CSV mode, you might just need to wrap the HTML field with a pair of quotes, and escape any quote characters that are inside of it.  Text mode is going to require a whole escaping run of all the reserved characters that are input.

-- 
Greg Smith, 2ndQuadrant US greg@2ndQuadrant.com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us
Author, "PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance"    Pre-ordering at:
https://www.packtpub.com/postgresql-9-0-high-performance/book

pgsql-admin by date:

Previous
From: "Kevin Grittner"
Date:
Subject: Re: can you change pg_hba.conf and restart the listener on the fly?
Next
From: Anuj Pankaj
Date:
Subject: Re: issue with Postgres uninstallation