Thread: Using COPY command when input file contain backslashes?

Celia McInnis wrote:
> I'm wanting to use the COPY command to bulk-load data which may contain
> backslashes and other special characters, and I want these characters to
> remain intact. Right now "\\" becomes "\", and single backslashes are lost
> (or modify the meaning of the following character). Is there some way (apart
> from pre-processing my (huge) input files) to get the data correctly into
> postgres?

No - pre-process the files. Unless a Turing-complete pre-processor was
built in to PG, then this will always be necessary for some type of file.

Of course, you don't need to take up twice the space to do this - just
copy from STDIN and pipe the output to psql.

--
   Richard Huxton
   Archonet Ltd