Chris spotts <rfusca@gmail.com> writes:
> I'm trying to copy from a tab delimited file. The dates inside the file
> are Unix timestamp style dates.
> I thought the following script would do the trick, but it just gives me
> an error saying
> ERROR: invalid input syntax for type timestamp: "1238736600"
> CONTEXT: COPY testtable line 1, column acquire_time: "1238736600"
A trigger isn't going to help in the least for that; the data has to be
a valid timestamp before the trigger will ever see it.
The usual trick for this type of conversion is to load the data into a
temporary table that has simple column types (eg integer or text) and
then do your transformations during an INSERT/SELECT into the real
target table.
regards, tom lane