I wrote: > It seems the psql \copy command doesn't work properly when dealing > with certain non-ascii characters (which ones I don't know). At any rate > I took some binary data and escaped it like so with perl.
I was wrong. I wasn't escaping things properly; in particular, ascii 0 needed to be escaped to \\000 . Also I was using 'text' type instead of 'bytea' type. I thought 'copy' was working but it was actually cutting off my input at the first ascii zero, whereas \copy gave me the error message. Sorry to waste people's time. In the event anyone else is out there who wants to use binary data with 'copy from' and is using perl to do the escaping this seems to work. # double up the escape character twice! Once for the 'copy from' command and # once for postgres bytea type escaping. $text=~s/\\/\\\\\\\\/g; $text=~s/\n/\\\n/g; # escape \n $text=~s/\t/\\\t/g; # escape \t $text=~s/'/\\'/g; # escape ' $text=~s/\x00/\\\\000/g; # escape ascii 0 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])