Re: psql and tab-delimited output - Mailing list pgsql-general

On 09/06/2014 10:34 AM, Abelard Hoffman wrote:

On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 7:28 AM, Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@aklaver.com

<mailto:adrian.klaver@aklaver.com>> wrote:

    On 09/06/2014 12:32 AM, Abelard Hoffman wrote:

[snip]

        So, my question is, what's the simplest way to generate tab-escaped
        TSV-formatted reports with the first line containing the list of
        column
        names?



    create table tsv_test (id int, fld_1 varchar);

    insert into tsv_test values (1, 'test    value');
    insert into tsv_test values (2, 'test    value');
    insert into tsv_test values (3, 'test    value');

    \copy tsv_test to 'data.tsv'  with  csv header delimiter '       ';

    aklaver@panda:~> cat data.tsv
    id      fld_1
    1       "test   value"
    2       "test   value"
    3       "test   value"


Thanks, Adrian. That works, but since we're using quotes to embed the
delimiter, we lose the simplicity of TSV. I can't just do a split on
/\t/ to get the fields and then unescape the values. At that point it's
probably simpler to just switch to standard CSV.

Using your example, the output I'd prefer is:

id    fld_1
1     test\tvalue
2     test\tvalue
3     test\tvalue

I guess it depends on what you are using.

In Python: