Re: COPY formatting

Karel Zak wrote:
>  Hi,
> 
>  in TODO is item: "* Allow dump/load of CSV format". I don't think
>  it's clean idea. Why CSV and why not something other? :-) 
> 
>  A why not allow to users full control of the format by they own
>  function. It means something like:
>  
>  COPY tablename [ ( column [, ...] ) ]
>      TO { 'filename' | STDOUT }
>      [ [ WITH ] 
>           [ BINARY ]
>           [ OIDS ]
>           [ DELIMITER [ AS ] 'delimiter' ]
>           [ NULL [ AS ] 'null string' ]
>           [ FORMAT funcname ] ]
>            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>                                                  
>  The formatting function API can be pretty simple:
> 
>  text *my_copy_format(text *attrdata, int direction, 
>              int nattrs, int attr, oid attrtype, oid relation)
> 
>  -- it's pseudocode of course, it should be use standard fmgr
>  interface.
>  
>  It's probably interesting for non-binary COPY version.
>  
>  Comments?
> 
>     Karel
> 


Karel,

This seems to be an excellent idea.
People have already asked for many different formats.
Usually I recommend them to use "psql -c "COPY ..." dbname | awk ...".
Since Windows will be supported soon, it will be hard to pipe data to a 
useful program (awk, sed, ...). Maybe this feature would help a lot in 
this case.
Regards,
    Hans




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