Kris Jurka wrote: > > > On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Andrew Dunstan wrote: > > > Longer term I'd like to be able to have a command parameter that > > specifies certain fields as multiline and for those relax the line end > > matching restriction (and for others forbid multiline altogether). That > > would be a TODO for 8.1 though, along with optional special handling for > > first line column headings. > > > > Endlessly extending the COPY command doesn't seem like a winning > proposition to me and I think if we aren't comfortable telling every user > to write a script to pre/post-process the data we should instead provide a > bulk loader/unloader that transforms things to our limited COPY > functionality. There are all kinds of feature requests I've seen > along these lines that would make COPY a million option mess if we try to > support all of it directly. > > - skipping header rows > - skipping certain data file columns > - specifying date formats > - ignoring duplicates > - outputting an arbitrary SELECT statement
Agreed. There are lots of wishes for COPY and it will become bloated if we do them all. I am concerned someone will say, "Oh, I know the CSV format and I might load the data into another database someday so I will always use CVS" not knowing it isn't a 100% consistent format. I think we need to issues a warning if a \r or \n is output by COPY CSV just so people understand the limitation. We can then reevaluate where we need to go for 8.1. Open item updated: * warn on COPY TO ... CSV with \r,\n in data -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us [EMAIL PROTECTED] | (610) 359-1001 + If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])