Re: COPY statement: no list of the allowed values for "format_name"

From: Bryn Llewellyn <bryn(at)yugabyte(dot)com>
To: "David G(dot) Johnston" <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com>
Cc: Pg Docs <pgsql-docs(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: COPY statement: no list of the allowed values for "format_name"
Date: 2020-10-30 00:13:22
Message-ID: 5A25C710-5642-4345-8E11-8A6AA6233ED7@yugabyte.com
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PG Doc comments form wrote:

Look at the account of the COPY statement, here:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/sql-copy.html <https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/sql-copy.html>

and see this:
«
[ [ WITH ] ( option [, ...] ) ]
»

It goes on to say this:

«
where option can be one of:

FORMAT format_name
»

But there's no list of the allowed values for "format_name". The same holds for other options like, for example, "encoding_name”.

David G. Johnston <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

Keep reading…

"""
FORMAT
Selects the data format to be read or written: text, csv (Comma Separated Values), or binary. The default is text.
"""

I suppose including the syntax term "format_type" might help, but the all-caps FORMAT is definitive.
____________________________________________________________

Thanks for the quick reply, David. I do think that it’s reasonable to expect to search in the page rather than to have to read every word from top to bottom in the class of use cases that my example indicates. FORMAT is the syntax keyword; and format_name denotes the value. I think that this present sentence:

«
Selects the data format to be read or written: text, csv (Comma Separated Values), or binary. The default is text.
»

would be improved if it were spelled more explicitly:

«
Selects the data format to be read or written. The allowed values for format_name are text, csv (Comma Separated Values), or binary. The default is text.
»

Please consider making this change (and the convention that it implies for comparable cases).

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