Re: utf8 COPY DELIMITER?

Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 02:28:18PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>
>> I doubt that supporting a single multibyte character would be an
>> interesting extension --- if we wanted to do anything at all there, we'd
>> just generalize the delimiter to be an arbitrary string. But it would
>> certainly slow down COPY by some amount, which is an area where you'll
>> get push-back for performance losses, so you'd need to make a convincing
>> use-case for it.
>>
>
> Couldn't we use a fast code path (what we have now) for the case when
> the delimiter is a single byte? That would allow for multi-character
> delimiters without penalizing those that don't use them.
>
> As for use case, I worked on migrating some stuff out of a MySQL
> database a while ago, and having arbitrary string delimiters would have
> made life easier.
>

The first thing to note is that the COPY code is quite complex and
fragile. Personally, I'd want a heck of a lot of convincing to see it
changed, and your use case looks to me like it would be better handled
by preprocessing using a perl script.

Also, if we accept string delimiters on input, we should also allow them
on output.

cheers

andrew