This is very similar to my problem with the ascii code 13s when I dumped and couldn't load the dumped data. What I did
wasto write a short script replaced the offending characters with an empty string which is different to NULL. The
otheralternative is to have
myfield text DEFAULT '' NOT NULL
in your schema. (The '' bit is two single quotes ie the empty string) This means anyone failing to insert a value for
thiscolumn will cause the db to insert an empty string rather than leaving it as NULL.)
Hilary
At 09:57 09/07/2004 +0200, Stef wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I'm stuck with a problem,about which I couldn't find
>much info. I'm sure somebody must have encountered this before.
>
>I've got a "NOT NULL" column of type text.
>It happens that freehand data gets inserted into this table, and
>it typically contains over 1000 rows with the value '\N' , and
>about another 3400 rows that has an occurrence of '\N'
>
>The database dumps fine, but when I import it again, I get
>"cannot insert null value into not null column"-type errors,
>and if I don't pay close attention, I end up with an empty table
>on the database. There is no way for me to tell how many columns
>could be affected in future, but I need to stabilize the backups.
>
>I'm using postgres version 7.3.4
>
>Any idea how to get around this problem?
>
>Kind Regards
>Stefan
Hilary Forbes
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