On 01/06/2012 03:42 PM, Phoenix Kiula wrote:
On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 6:20 PM, Adrian Klaver<adrian.kla...@gmail.com>  wrote:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/interactive/sql-copy.html

Search for
NULL


Thanks Adrian.

Without examples, it's hard to predict syntax. If the value after a
pipe is missing altogether, I suppose the missing value is "\n"
(newline). But this doesn't work:

    copy vl from 'data.txt' WITH DELIMITER AS '|' NULL '\n';

None of these work either:

    copy vl from 'data.txt' WITH DELIMITER AS '|' NULL \n;
    copy vl from 'data.txt' WITH DELIMITER AS '|' NULL \\n;
    copy vl from 'data.txt' WITH DELIMITER AS '|' NULL '';

The first two give errors, the third one throws the same missing value
for column error.

The data is stored like this:

     123|big string here|189209209|US|2001-01-01
     123|big string here|189209209|US|2001-01-01
     123|big string here|189209209|US|2001-01-01
     123|big string here|189209209|US|2001-01-01

But sometimes, the strings are:

     |big string here|189209209|US|2001-01-01
     |big string here|189209209|US|2001-01-01

Or

     123|big string here|189209209|US
     123|big string here|189209209|US|

So you see either the first column, which is the ID in a way, is
missing so the "missing character" is probably a blank (''?). In this
case I want COPY to just ignore this line.

Or the last column is missing, where the missing character can be a
newline I suppose?

So how do I specify this in the COPY command so that it doesn't croak?
If a line's ID is missing, it should ignore the line and go on instead
of not doing anything by throwing an error for EVERYTHING!

Thanks.


Missing data is one thing, missing delimiters is another. Try doing a small copy of data with just a few lines to see which variants are actually causing the error. My money is on the one that has a mismatch between the table column count and the data column count. I.e., the row with three delimiters instead of four:

23|big string here|189209209|US

When you say "ignore", do you mean that you want PostgreSQL to assume a null value for the missing column or to not import that row at all?

In general, when you have data scrubbing issues like this, grep/sed/awk/... are your friends. Clean it up then import it.

I suppose you could import all rows into a big text field and process it in PostgreSQL but I doubt you will find that to be an optimal solution.

Cheers,
Steve

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