David, Thanks for your help. I did have null values represented as
zero-length strings. I'll just run these files through a sed script
to replace the zero-length strings with "\N".
David Hartwig writes:
> How are you representing NULL in the source file. Blank or zero length
> strings are not NULL. They are treated as illegal dates. I believe
> "\N" is used to represent NULL in the copy in/out.
>
> William D. McCoy wrote:
>
> > I'm running Postgres 6.3.2 on a Sparc20 running Solaris 2.5.1 and I'm
> > having difficulty copying data from certain text files where fields
> > expected to be type 'date' are null. When the copy encounters the
> > null field it stops and prints the message:
> >
> > ERROR: Bad date external representation
> >
> > I have purposely _not_ defined the field as 'not null'. I have not
> > had trouble reading from files where other types of fields are null.
> >
> > Any ideas, or is this a known bug?
--
William D. McCoy
Geosciences
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003