On Wed, 2009-09-09 at 16:34 -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote: > 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.
Maybe we could put a catch-all "text" or even "text[]" column at as the last one of the table and gather all extra columns there ? > -- > Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/ > The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc. -- Hannu Krosing http://www.2ndQuadrant.com PostgreSQL Scalability and Availability Services, Consulting and Training -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
