Re: table column information

On Mon, 2004-05-17 at 00:19 +0000, ljb wrote:
> >
> > I am writing some php scripts where I want to generate a list of the
> > column names in a particular table that the user selects. I could take
> > the brute force method and hard code the column names but then every
> > time I add a new table or modify an existing one I would have to modify
> > the code. What I want is to have a generic function that given the
> > table name it will pull the column names for my use.
> >
> > I need to get the table column names for several tables I have setup. I
> > know if I do a select * from tablename I can then use the pg_fieldname
> > function to pull the column names for all columns.
> >
> > But I don't think I want to select the entire contents of the table
> > every time I want to get the names of the columns. I know this will
> > work but I think performance will be very poor.
> >...
>
> You almost got it - just do "select * from tablename where 0=1", which returns
> no rows but will give you the fieldnames. A portable and (I think)
> efficient way to get table column names.

It can be a cute trick, and I use it myself from time to time
(especially for "CREATE TABLE AS SELECT ..." where I want an empty table
with the same structure, pre v 7.4 which can do this anyway). You
should be aware however that as written above it will almost invariably
force a full-table scan!

You can also select the column names from the database metadata
directly:

SELECT attname
FROM pg_class c join pg_attribute a on c.oid = a.attrelid
WHERE c.relname = '<your table name>'
AND a.attnum >= 0;

This approach won't get killed by the efficiency problems above.

Cheers,
Andrew.
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