Re: COPY table_name (single_column) FROM 'unknown.txt' DELIMITER E'\n'

On Wed, May 5, 2021 at 10:34 AM Isaac Morland <isaac(dot)morland(at)gmail(dot)com>
wrote:

> On Wed, 5 May 2021 at 13:23, Chapman Flack <chap(at)anastigmatix(dot)net> wrote:
>
>> On 05/05/21 13:02, David G. Johnston wrote:
>> > Why not just allow: "DELIMITER NONE" to be valid syntax meaning exactly
>> > what it says and does exactly what you desire?
>>
>> What would it mean? That you get one column, multiple rows of text
>> corresponding to "lines" delimited by something, or that you get one
>> column, one row of text for the entire content of the file?
>>
>
> It means no column delimiter. In other words, there is no character
> which marks the end of a data value, so the entire line is a single data
> value.
>
>
This. When dealing with COPY it's expected that each line becomes its own
row. On the server you can do pg_read_file() if you need the entire file
to be considered a single value. psql (\I and variables) is a bit more
hackey, but I'd rather see that improved directly anyway if the goal is to
try and make getting the "whole document" easier - copy isn't the right API
for that IMO.

David J.