On 10/12/2010 08:28 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
Steve Crawford wrote:
On 09/25/2010 07:03 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
rey<reyw...@optonline.net>   writes:

Why limit this to a single character?

Performance.  Believe it or not, breaking fields at the delimiter is
a significant factor in COPY speed.

                        regards, tom lane


I agree that that multi-character (or even regex) delimiters would be
useful. Would it be reasonable for the copy process to differentiate
between single character delimiters which could be processed in
"high-speed" mode and multi-character or regex delimiters which would be
available as needed albeit at the expense of a performance hit?
I am not sure you are aware but Postgres never confuses delimiters from
data because it uses a backslash before literal data that matches
delimiters.

Yes, I am. But the discussion was about using multi-character strings as delimiters.

But while I have encountered files using multiple-character delimiters, I'm finding myself leaning toward the camp that says that such cases are better processed externally by Perl/Python/sed/awk/Ruby/ETL/etc. Especially given the "fun" of defining how to properly escape a regex-matching string in a regex delimited file.

Cheers,
Steve


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