Re: [PATCHES] Plan for CSV handling of quotes, NULL

[Andrew Dunstan]

Bruce Momjian wrote: Andrew Dunstan wrote: Bruce Momjian wrote: What about NULL input? Is my warning and promotion to zero-length string for NOT NULL columns OK? I know I originally floated this idea or one very like it, but I have become convinced it is not a good idea after all. The user might not know or expect that the data file has nulls, in which case promoting the value might not be what s/he expects at all. I think there's a world of difference between the user saying "I know there might be nulls in this CSV column - ignore them" and us doing it automagically and issuing a warning, which might elicit the response "Doh! I wish you'd told me beforehand." If we provide an option to override handling of nulls on input per column, then we can safely fail on encountering an unexpected null, and all the user will have to do would be to rerun the command with the override. Recovering from an unexpected promotion to non-null would be a lot harder. OK, so we need a list of columns for output with quotes, and a list of columns where NULL should be changed to zero-length strings. How about if we use FORCE to force quotes on output, and CONVERT to convert null to zero-length strings on input? Works for me. I think I would be inclined just to use whatever null_print happens to be, rather than make empty string magical. In the usual case they would be the same. cheers andrew