On Friday 17 December 2010 7:46:12 am Mark Watson wrote:
> Hello all,
> Firstly, I apologise if this is not the correct list for this subject.
> Lately, I've been working on a data conversion, importing into Postgres
> using Copy From. The text file I'm copying from is produced from an ancient
> program and produces either a tab or semi-colon delimited file. One file
> contains about 1.8M rows and has a 'comments' column. The exporting
> program, which I am forced to use, does not surround this column with
> quotes and this column contains cr/lf characters, which I must deal with
> (and have dealt with) before I can import the file via Copy. Hence to my
> suggestion: I was envisioning a parameter DELIMITER_COUNT which, if one was
> 100% confident that all columns are accounted for in the input file, could
> be used to alleviate the need to deal with cr/lf's in varchar and text
> columns. i.e., if copy loaded a line with fewer delimiters than
> delimiter_count, the next line from the text file would be read and the
> assignment of columns would continue for the current row/column.
> Just curious as to the thoughts out there.
> Thanks to all for this excellent product, and a merry Christmas/holiday
> period to all.
>
> Mark Watson
A suggestion,give pgloader a look;
http://pgloader.projects.postgresql.org/
If I am following you it might already have the solution to the multi-line
problem. In particular read the History section of the docs.
Thanks,
--
Adrian Klaver
adrian.klaver@gmail.com