Andrew Dunstan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Thinking about this some more .... maybe the right rule would be "quote all non-numeric non-null values".
And how would you define "numeric"?
At least the following:
int8 int2 int4 float4 float8 numeric money
and domains based on them.
I do *not* like putting data-type-specific knowledge into COPY.
I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible. But we have to be a bit smart if we want to be able to export nicely. Here's the problem: say you have a text field that stores something that has numeric form (phone number, SSN, whatever). You want that exported as text (i.e. quoted). Otherwise, things like leading zeros will get lost by the importing program. However, you *must* not quote genuine number values, or they will not be imported correctly either. So, either we get a little bit smart about the types we are exporting, or our export is going to be broken in some cases. We need to be able to use more information than is contained in the text representation of the value.
I would certainly hope to keep all this confined to the CSV code path, and not intrude on any existing functionality in any way.
Exporting nicely has a lot more wrinkles than importing nicely, because predicting the behaviour of the program we might be exporting to is difficult.
If you can suggest a better way I'm all ears.
cheers
andrew
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