Tom Lane wrote: > And, in fact, right now *none* of psql's table output formats is both > unambiguous and reasonably simple/popular to use. So the astonishing > thing about this patch, IMO, is that we didn't do it a decade ago.
Yeah, that's what motivated this submission in the first place. > I feel that if we allow multi-byte characters here, we might as well > take the training wheels off and just say you can use any separator > string you want, as long as it doesn't contain double quote, \r, or \n. The reason behind disallowing multiple characters was the likeliness of them being mistakes. For instance, this example came up at some point in the discussion: \pset fieldsep_csv ,, To me the probability that a user has fat-fingered this is pretty high, and this would silently produce a really bogus file. Another kind of mistake comes from the difficulty of properly quoting on the command line: psql -- csv -P fieldsep_csv='\t' would be interpreted as a two-character separator despite being obviously not the user's intention. About disallowing characters beyond US-ASCII, I can't find a similar justification. COPY does not allow them, but it's justified (in the archives) by the fear of being slower when importing, which is not a concern here. > We could avoid this self-inflicted confusion by choosing a different > parameter name. I'd be good with "csv_fieldsep" or "csvfieldsep". +1 > Or we could kill both issues by hard-wiring the separator as ','. Ideally people would understand that they can use -A for any delimiter but no quoting, or --csv with strict quoting and in that case a fixed delimiter is fine, since it's going to be safely quoted, its presence in the data is not a problem. But I'm not too confident that everyone would understand it that way, even if it's well explained in the doc. When one is told "please produce CSV files with semi-colons as separators", it's simpler to just produce that rather than arguing that these requirements are probably ill-advised. Best regards, -- Daniel Vérité PostgreSQL-powered mailer: http://www.manitou-mail.org Twitter: @DanielVerite
