Re: Escaping special characters - \r when doing COPY CSV

Thanks Laurenz, any trick up your sleeves that will work for a select *
instead of having to do it for individual columns

On Thu, Sep 4, 2025 at 7:29 PM Laurenz Albe <laurenz(dot)albe(at)cybertec(dot)at>
wrote:

> On Thu, 2025-09-04 at 18:01 +1200, Edwin UY wrote:
> > I don't have access to run copy as this is a RDS database so I can only
> use \copy.
> > I need to send the output to csv.
> > One of the fields has a special character = \r. I can see it visually.
> >
> > Running the \copy below gives me extra row/s because of the \r
> > \copy ( select * from blah where blah_ref = '666' order by
> date_created desc limit 5; ) to 'abc.csv' WITH CSV DELIMITER ',' HEADER
> >
> > I have tried this
> > \copy ( select * from blah where blah_ref = '666' order by
> date_created desc limit 5; ) to 'abc.csv' WITH (FORMAT CSV, HEADER, ESCAPE
> '\r');
> >
> > But it gives ERROR: COPY escape must be a single one-byte character.
> >
> > Besides using a view for the SQL, as suggested when I do a web search,
> any chance someone here knows how to do it without using a view?
>
> There is no problem with having the carriage return characters in the CSV
> output,
> but if you'd rather do without them, you could trim them:
>
> \copy (SELECT trim(textcol, E'\u000d'), othercol, ... FROM tab ...) TO
> ...
>
> In order to include escape sequences into a string literal, you have to
> prepend
> the opening single quote with an "E" for "extended":
>
> E'\r'
> E'\x0D'
> E'\u000D'
> E'\U0000000D'
>
> Yours,
> Laurenz Albe
>