selective copy

Hey group,
I know you can't do a selective copy but I was wondering if someone can
suggest the most effective way to get the same result.

What I have is a lot of text data with unknown characters. Quotes,
apostrophes, carriage returns and etc. There could be hundreds or thousands
of rows in the table but I only want one or two. I need to get the data
into an external file so it can be transported to another database and
re-inserted.

What I've done in the past is dump the table's data using pg_dump -t table
and using INSERTS instead of copy and then grep the results so that I only
get the desired line. That only works when I'm using simple data that
doesn't wrap to different lines.

I'm doing this to restore data from a backup :`(

--
Matthew Nuzum
www.bearfruit.org
cobalt(at)bearfruit(dot)org