Re: csv format for psql

On 28 March 2018 at 15:43, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:

> On 03/28/2018 12:35 PM, David G. Johnston wrote:
>
> I like to call it "Character Separated Values" now for just that reason.
>
>
> Isn't the actual wording Character Delimited Values? I may be picking at
> hairs here but every single time I use anything to import a CSV or other
> delimited file (TAB or | usually) that is what the import screen says.
>

CSV stands for Comma Separated Values, and not anything else common as far
as I can tell. A Google search for "csv" turns up the Wikipedia page
describing the file format as the first hit, followed by the Wikipedia
disambiguation page for CSV, which links to the aforementioned Wikipedia
page as the only file-format-related link.

The actual reason I'm posting this is because some of the discussion has
made me a bit confused: there is already a CSV format defined for the COPY
command and used by the psql \copy. I just want to check that what is being
discussed here would use the exact same format as the existing CSV COPY
format; and the configurability of them should be the exact same options
(which already includes being able to change the delimiter). I think it's
important that Postgres not have two CSVs with slightly different
behaviours. Indeed, psql could use COPY behind the scenes to generate the
CSV output, which would guarantee no nasty surprises.

If this is already widely accepted or if I'm horribly misunderstanding the
discussion then I'm sorry for the noise.