Note that spaces between QUOTE and DELIMITER are included in the field during CVS COPY.

Darcy Buskermolen wrote:

+       CSV mode will include all characters between <literal>QUOTE</> and 
+       <literal>DELIMITER</> in the value for the field, this is of special
+       attention to those who use CSV mode to import data from other RDBMS
+       systems that create fixed width CSV files.

First, this need some grammar cleanup. But more importantly, it's not
quite a correct formulation. CSV mode splits a line on (unquoted)
delimiters. Within each chunk dequoting is done, and withing quoted
sections de-escaping is done. But nothing is discarded.

i.e. with the quote char as '"', 'foo"bar"baz' becomes 'foobarbaz' and '
"x" ' becomes ' x '.

I understand Dary's problem has been that Oracle pads CSV lines with
spaces. Perhaps we need to warn specifically about that - I suspect most
people for whom it might be important will miss the significance otherwise.

I'll work on some better wording.

cheers

andrew

+    <note>
+     <para>
+       CSV mode will include all characters between <literal>QUOTE</> and
+       <literal>DELIMITER</> in the value for the field, this is of special
+       attention to those who use CSV mode to import data from other RDBMS
+       systems that create fixed width CSV files.
+     </para>
+   </note>

Sorry, I do not understand the issue you are describing above. Can you
supply an example?

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

I wrote:

Darcy Buskermolen wrote:

+ CSV mode will include all characters between
<literal>QUOTE</> and

+       <literal>DELIMITER</> in the value for the field, this is of 
special
+       attention to those who use CSV mode to import data from other 
RDBMS
+       systems that create fixed width CSV files.

First, this need some grammar cleanup. But more importantly, it's not
quite a correct formulation. CSV mode splits a line on (unquoted)
delimiters. Within each chunk dequoting is done, and withing quoted
sections de-escaping is done. But nothing is discarded.

i.e. with the quote char as '"', 'foo"bar"baz' becomes 'foobarbaz' and
' "x" ' becomes ' x '.

I understand Dary's problem has been that Oracle pads CSV lines with
spaces. Perhaps we need to warn specifically about that - I suspect
most people for whom it might be important will miss the significance
otherwise.

I'll work on some better wording.

How about this?

In CSV mode all characters are significant. A quoted value surrounded by
white space, or any characters other than <literal>DELIMITER</>, will
include those characters. This can cause errors if you import data from
a system that pads CSV lines with white space out to some fixed width.
If such a situation arises you might need to preprocess the CSV file to
remove the trailing white space, before importing the data into Postgres.

cheers

andrew

I wrote:

In CSV mode all characters are significant. A quoted value surrounded
by white space, or any characters other than <literal>DELIMITER</>,
will include those characters. This can cause errors if you import
data from a system that pads CSV lines with white space out to some
fixed width. If such a situation arises you might need to preprocess
the CSV file to remove the trailing white space, before importing the
data into Postgres.

Patch applied with pretty much this wording.

cheers

andrew