I agree. My modest proposal for handling CSVs would be to extend the DELIMITER parameter to allow up to 3 characters - separator, quote and escape. Escape would default to the quote char and the quote char would default to unspecified. This would involve no grammar changes and fairly isolated and small code changes, I believe. In the most common CSV cases you would just use $$,"$$ or $$,'$$. :-)To be honest this idea strikes me as overkill - over engineering. While there is a clear need for proper CSV import (i.e. just setting DELIMITER to ',' doesn't work due to ','s in strings) I cannot see how this would prove useful, or who would use it?
COPY is basically line/tuple oriented, and that alone would exclude many file formats (e.g. imagine wanting to import a spreadsheet where each worksheet was the table name and the first row on each worksheet was the field names - I have seen such beasts more than once). If we want a general facility for loading and exporting foreign file formats, I really believe that is the province of a utility program rather than a database engine function.
The reason in my mind for making CSV a special case is that it is very easy to do and so often asked for.
(I used to set parsing CSVs as a basic programming exercise - it is amazing how many way people find to get it wrong).
cheers
andrew
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