On Wed, May 17, 2023, at 19:42, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> You can use CSV mode pretty reliably for TSV files. The trick is to use a
> quoting char that shouldn't appear, such as E'\x01' as well as setting the
> delimiter to E'\t'. Yes, it's far from obvious.
I've been using that trick myself many times in the past, but thanks to this
deep-dive into this topic, it looks to me like TEXT would be a better format
fit when dealing with unquoted TSV files, or?
OTOH, one would then need to inspect the TSV file doesn't contain \. on an empty
line...
I was about to suggest we perhaps should consider adding a TSV format, that
is like TEXT excluding the PostgreSQL specific things like \. and \N,
but then I tested exporting TSV from Numbers on Mac and Google Sheets,
and I can see there are incompatible differences. Numbers quote fields
that contain double-quote marks, while Google Sheets doesn't.
None of them (unsurpringly) uses midfield quoting though.
Anyone using Excel that could try exporting the following example as CSV/TSV?
CREATE TABLE t (a text, b text, c text, d text);
INSERT INTO t (a, b, c, d)
VALUES ('unquoted','a "quoted" string', 'field, with a comma', E'field\t with a tab');