"James Moe" <jimoe(at)sohnen-moe(dot)com> writes:
> this bizarre error message is produced in psql:
> ": can't parse "ne 1, pg_atoi: error in "1
That's unrelated to your NULL issue. It looks like you have
Windows-style newlines (\r\n) in your data. COPY only likes
Unix-style newlines (\n). It thinks the \r is a data character.
I think this is finally relaxed for 7.4, but in all current releases
you need to get rid of the carriage return characters.
regards, tom lane