Re: Good Delimiter for copy command

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 05:17:40PM +0100, Marco Colombo wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> > Andrew Gould <andrewlylegould(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> >> To the list: Does pg_dump escape characters that are the same as the
> >> delimiter?
> >
> > Yes. The OP has not actually explained why he needs to pick a
> > nondefault delimiter, unless maybe it is that he wants to feed the
> > dump to some program that is too dumb to deal with escaping.
> >
> > regards, tom lane
> >
>
> Which makes me wonder, does copy accept UTF-8 input?

Yes, but...

> Is it possibile to use some unicode character which is unlikely to
> appear in the data set as delimiter? Something like U+FFFC.

No. The delimiter needs to be one byte long at the moment. The error
message you're getting probably needs an update. Bug?

> $ psql -c "\copy test from '2.txt' delimiter ●"
> ERROR: COPY delimiter must be a single character
> \copy: ERROR: COPY delimiter must be a single character

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
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