Finding Errors in .csv Input Data

From: Rich Shepard <rshepard(at)appl-ecosys(dot)com>
To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Finding Errors in .csv Input Data
Date: 2011-02-23 01:10:34
Message-ID: alpine.LNX.2.00.1102221700070.32123@salmo.appl-ecosys.com
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I'm sure many of you have solved this problem in the past and can offer
solutions that will work for me. The context is a 73-column postgres table
of data that was originally in an Access .mdb file. A colleague loaded the
file into Access and wrote a .csv file for me to use since we have nothing
Microsoft here. There are 110,752 rows in the file/table. After a lot of
cleaning with emacs and sed, the copy command accepted all but 80 rows of
data. Now I need to figure out why postgres reports them as having too many
columns.

Starting to work with a single row, I first compared by cleaned row to the
raw .csv from the Access output. They match column-by-column. Then I copied
the schema to a text file and started comparing the .csv data
column-by-column. While this looks OK to me, postgres doesn't like it. For
example, I get this error message:

nevada=# \copy water_well from 'one.csv' with delimiter '|' null '' CSV;
ERROR: value too long for type character(1)
CONTEXT: COPY water_well, line 1, column gravel_packed: "106"

Yet, the column comparison for gravel_packed and surrounding attributes
does not show this:

lot_no TEXT, |
block_no TEXT, |
well_finish_date DATE, 11/15/1948|
date_cmplt_acc CHAR(1), D|
gravel_packed CHAR(1), |
depth_seal INTEGER, |
depth_drilled INTEGER, 106|
depth_bedrock INTEGER, |
aquifer_desc TEXT, |

Notice the NULL value for gravel_packed, while the "106" is for
depth_drilled, two columns later.

I'm stymied and wonder if there's a tool I can use to fix these 80 rows so
the copy command will accept them.

Rich

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