Re: Need help doing a CSV import

On 14/07/2010 7:04 PM, tony(at)exquisiteimages(dot)com wrote:
> I am in the process of moving a FoxPro based system to PostgreSQL.
>
> We have several tables that have memo fields which contain carriage
> returns and line feeds that I need to preserve. I thought if I converted
> these into the appropriate \r and \n codes that they would be imported as
> carriage returns and line feeds, but instead they are stored in the
> database as \r and \n.

PostgreSQL doesn't process escapes in CSV import mode.

You can reformat the data into the non-csv COPY format, which WILL
process escapes. Or you can post-process it after import to expand them.
Unfortunately PostgreSQL doesn't offer an option to process escapes when
"CSV" mode COPY is requested.

I posted a little Python script that reads CSV data and spits out
COPY-friendly output a few days ago. It should be trivially adaptable to
your needs, you'd just need to change the input dialect options. See the
archives for the script.

--
Craig Ringer