Re: How To: LARGE html text or csv file COPY FROM?

Lou Picciano wrote:p { margin: 0; }
> Both errors above make sense to me; COPY is running into either a cr
> or a tab character in each case.

Even though they might seem very similar at first, text mode and CSV
mode work very differently here. To quote TFM at
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-copy.html , which
covers all this if you dig into it enough:

"CSV mode will both recognize and produce CSV files with quoted values
containing embedded carriage returns and line feeds. Thus the files are
not strictly one line per table row like text-mode files."

So as long as the field is quoted, you can have a CR or tab in the middle.

In text mode: "the following characters /must/ be preceded by a
backslash if they appear as part of a column value: backslash itself,
newline, carriage return, and the current delimiter character." Text
mode will therefore require escaping everything on that list.

So if this is close to being importable in CSV mode, you might just need
to wrap the HTML field with a pair of quotes, and escape any quote
characters that are inside of it. Text mode is going to require a whole
escaping run of all the reserved characters that are input.

--
Greg Smith, 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support www.2ndQuadrant.us
Author, "PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance" Pre-ordering at:
https://www.packtpub.com/postgresql-9-0-high-performance/book