Tom Lane said: > Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes: >> Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote: >>> Is there any way to force COPY to accept that there will be lines of >>> different length in a data file? > >> I suppose we could have a TRAILINGNULL flag to COPY but because few >> ask for this feature, it hardly seems worth it. > > There is no chance that we'll ever be able to cope with every insane > file format that some benighted program claims is CSV. The harder we > try, the more we will lose the ability to detect data errors at all; > not to mention the likely negative consequences for the readability and > performance of the COPY code. I think "fix it with a perl script" is a > very reasonable answer for cases like this one. >
I agree. The COPY code is probably on the edge of maintainability now. Our CSV routines accept a wide variety of imports formats, but a fixed number of columns is required. Maybe we need a pgfoundry project with some general perl CSV munging utilities - this issue comes up often enough. cheers andrew ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly