Escaping input from COPY

Hi folks,

In a Perl application I would like to frequently bulk load
several hundred thousand rows of data into a temporary
table before merging the contents into the database proper.
I'm currently doing individual INSERTs into the temporary
table, which has obviously got a significant performance
penalty--the importing takes several minutes even on a
very fast machine.

I'd like to switch to COPY, which should be orders of
magnitude faster. I see that DBD::Pg has an interface for
this, which looks just fine. My problem is with how to
escape the data. I need to use whatever escaping rules
are in use by the server, which I've seen documented in
the manual; but in order to cope with any future changes
to these rules, and ensure identical behaviour, are there
any standard functions I can use to escape the data before
loading it?

Thanks,
Roger

--
.''`. Roger Leigh
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