Tom Lane wrote:
Where would you want this file conversion utility? bin? contrib? pgfoundry?I'd say pgfoundry for starters --- there's no reason to tie it down to server release cycles. Maybe when the thing is fairly mature and doesn't need frequent releases, we could think about whether it ought to be brought into the core distro. However, it likely won't ever be a candidate to become part of core unless it's written in C, and offhand I would judge C to not be the best choice of implementation language for such a thing. This is surely going to be mostly a string-pushing type of problem, so something like perl might be a better bet.
You are probably right. The biggest wrinkle will be dealing with various encodings, I suspect. That at least is one thing that doing CSV within the backend bought us fairly painlessly. Perl's Text::CSV_XS module for example simply handles this by declaring that only [\x09\x20-\x7f] are valid in its non-binary mode, and in either mode appears to be MBCS unaware. We should try to do better than that.
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