COPY formatting

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 Zak <zakkr(at)zf(dot)jcu(dot)cz>
http://home.zf.jcu.cz/~zakkr/