Tom Lane wrote: > Andrew Dunstan <and...@dunslane.net> writes: > >> I have received a requirement for the ability to import ragged CSV > >> files, i.e. files that contain variable numbers of columns per row. > > BTW, one other thought about this: I think the historical reason for > COPY being strict about the number of incoming columns was that it > provided a useful cross-check that the parsing hadn't gone off into > the weeds. We have certainly seen enough examples where the reported > manifestation of, say, an escaping mistake was that COPY saw the row > as having too many or too few columns. So being permissive about it > would lose some error detection capability. I am not clear about > whether CSV format is sufficiently more robust than the traditional > COPY format to render this an acceptable loss. Comments?
I think accepting less columns and filling with nulls should be protected enough for this not to be a problem; if the parser goes nuts, it will die eventually. Silently dropping excessive trailing columns does not seem acceptable though; you could lose entire rows and not notice. -- Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/ The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc. -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
