Using COPY command when input file contain backslashes?

Started by Celia McInnisover 20 years ago2 messagesgeneral
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#1Celia McInnis
celia.mcinnis@gmail.com

I'm wanting to use the COPY command to bulk-load data which may contain
backslashes and other special characters, and I want these characters to
remain intact. Right now "\\" becomes "\", and single backslashes are lost
(or modify the meaning of the following character). Is there some way (apart
from pre-processing my (huge) input files) to get the data correctly into
postgres?
Thanks for your help,
Celia McInnis

#2Richard Huxton
dev@archonet.com
In reply to: Celia McInnis (#1)
Re: Using COPY command when input file contain backslashes?

Celia McInnis wrote:

I'm wanting to use the COPY command to bulk-load data which may contain
backslashes and other special characters, and I want these characters to
remain intact. Right now "\\" becomes "\", and single backslashes are lost
(or modify the meaning of the following character). Is there some way (apart
from pre-processing my (huge) input files) to get the data correctly into
postgres?

No - pre-process the files. Unless a Turing-complete pre-processor was
built in to PG, then this will always be necessary for some type of file.

Of course, you don't need to take up twice the space to do this - just
copy from STDIN and pipe the output to psql.

--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd