On Fri, 2006-11-17 at 15:46 -0500, Wm.A.Stafford wrote:
If we use '\x05' as suggested by the
Fastreader User guide. PostgreSQL complains "ERROR: COPY delimiter
must be a single character".
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
\x05, aka control-e, ctl-e, ^e, C-e, etc, is merely one way to represent the *single* ASCII character 5. When a manual says type \x05, it almost surely means that some program will interpret those four printable chars as a single non-printable character rather than the 4-char string literally. Different programs use different representations of control characters and \x is very common, but the problem is that postgres's copy command doesn't understand this syntax for non-printable characters. No matter, copy will work for you, and in fact you can use TWO ways to represent control-e.
Option 1: Instead of '\x05', type E'\x05', that is:
- letter E
- single quote
- the 4-char string \x05
- single quote
E is postgresql's way of indicating that the string will be interpreted in way that does not conform to SQL spec. This results from the pg developers being pedantic about conformance and refusing to extend the standard carelessly (I love 'em for this attitude).
Option 2: Instead of '\x05', type 'C-vC-e' . By this I mean:
- single quote
- control-v
- control-e
- single quote.
The magic here is that control-v means "take the next character verbatim". In effect, you're typing ASCII char 5 (a single character) literally into the single quotes rather than \x05 or any other representation of it (e.g., \x05). I'm pretty sure that readline is responsible for this interaction, and therefore this probably doesn't work on readline-less installations.
-Reece