On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 09:36:17AM -0500, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Lee Kindness wrote:
>
> >To be honest this idea strikes me as overkill - over
> >engineering. While there is a clear need for proper CSV import
> >(i.e. just setting DELIMITER to ',' doesn't work due to ','s in
> >strings) I cannot see how this would prove useful, or who would use
> >it?
> >
> >
> >
> I agree. My modest proposal for handling CSVs would be to extend the
> DELIMITER parameter to allow up to 3 characters - separator, quote and
> escape. Escape would default to the quote char and the quote char would
> default to unspecified. This would involve no grammar changes and fairly
> isolated and small code changes, I believe. In the most common CSV cases
> you would just use $$,"$$ or $$,'$$. :-)
I look at backend COPY code and it will better clean up this "party ofglobal static values" before add something to
this code. (My priviteopinion of course).
The problem with CSV is that it will correctly work with new protocolonly. Because old versions of clients are
newline sensitive. And CSVcan contains newline in by quotation marks defined attributes:
"John", "Smith", "The White House1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NWWashington, DC 20500", "male", "open source software
office"Itis one record. It's difficult to say it :-), but your DELIMITER idea is better than mysuggested API. Andrew,
goahead. I thought about some data streaming,but COPY is probably bad place for it.
Karel
-- Karel Zak <zakkr@zf.jcu.cz>http://home.zf.jcu.cz/~zakkr/