I'm trying to import a tab-delimited file into my PostgreSQL database. One of the fields in my file is a "title" field, which occasionally contains actual quotation marks. For example, my tsv might look like:
id title
5 Hello/Bleah" Foo
(Yeah, there's just that one quotation mark in the title.)
When I try importing the file into my database:
copy articles from 'articles.tsv' with delimiter E'\t' csv header;
I get this error, referencing that line:
ERROR: unterminated CSV quoted field
How do I fix this? Quotation marks are never used to surround entire fields in the file. I tried copy articles from 'articles.tsv' with delimiter E'\t' escape E'\\' csv header; but I get the same error on the same line.
Assuming the file never actually tries to quote its fields:
The option you want is "with quote", see http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/sql-copy.html
Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to turn off quote processing altogether, one kludge would be to specify a character that does not appear in your file at all.
Tab separated is the default format for copy statements. Treating them as CSV is just silly. (do you take this path just to skip the header ?)
copy articles from 'articles.tsv';
does exactly what you want.
I struggled with the same error and a few more. Finally gathering knowledge from few SO questions I came up with the following setup for making COPY TO/FROM successful even for quite sophisticated JSON columns:
COPY "your_schema_name.yor_table_name" (your, column_names, here)
FROM STDIN WITH CSV DELIMITER E'\t' QUOTE '\b' ESCAPE '\';
--here rows data
\.
the most important parts:
QUOTE '\b' - quote with backspace (thanks a lot #grautur!)
DELIMITER E'\t' - delimiter with tabs
ESCAPE '\' - and escape with a backslash
Related
I need to export various tables in CSV for AWS Glue Catalog and I just noticed a major showstopper:
COPY command does not escape new line inputs in columns, only quotes them.
What confuses me even more is that I can switch to TEXT and get the format right - escape the special characters - but I cannot have HEADER in that format!
COPY (%s) TO STDOUT DELIMITER ',' NULL ''
Is there a way to get both HEADER and to escape the new line through COPY command?
I'm hoping that it's my overlook as the code is obviously there.
The text format does not produce CSV, that is why you cannot get headers or change the delimiter. It is the “internal” tab-separated format of PostgreSQL.
There are no provisions to replace newlines with \n in a CSV file, and indeed that would produce invalid CSV (according to what most people think; there is no standard).
You'll have to post-process the file.
I am trying to do a bulk insert into postgres db using copy command from csv file. All the columns in the db table are character_varying(1024) type.The copy command is failing on certain values which are in Double quotes
For example:
"TODD'S JAMES RENO PHCY,INC."
My copy command looks like below:
\copy file_tmp FROM /srv/data0/transfer/data_2.csv USING DELIMITERS ','
Could you please help in how to escape these special characters and get this working?
Although you have specified a delimiter, you have not specified a format, so it is still using "text". In "text" format, thing are escaped by backslashes, not quotes.
Also, 'USING DELIMITERS' is an extremely obsolete syntax.
You probably want something like:
\copy file_tmp FROM /srv/data0/transfer/data_2.csv WITH (FORMAT CSV)
You don't need to specify the delimiter, because it defaults to ',' when using CSV format.
Of course this still might fail on parts of the data you haven't shown us.
This is a very simple problem, I am using the psql terminal command COPY as shown bellow
COPY tbname FROM '/tmp/file.csv'
delimiter '|' csv;
However this file.csv contains data such as
random|stuff|32"
as well as
random|other "stuff"|15
I tried to use the double quote to escape the quotes as the Postgres site suggested
random|stuff|32""
random|other ""stuff""|15
This seems to remove the quotes completely which I don't want.
Is there a way to get the import to just treat these quotes as regular characters so that they appear in the database as they do in the csv file?
According to the documentation, the default quote symbol is ", so you need to provide a QUOTE argument with a different symbol. The quote symbol has to be a single one-byte character.
COPY tbname FROM '/tmp/file.csv'
delimiter '|' QUOTE '}' csv; -- use a symbol you know does not appear in your file.
I have my simple CSV file, delimited by commas and no strange character, and when trying to do a \COPY table FROM '/srv/www/.../CSV.csv' WITH DELIMITER ',' I get the error
ERROR: literal newline found in data
HINT: Use "\n" to represent newline.
Its not the first time I execute a COPY and it never happened to me. I exported the CSV from excel to Notepad and saved here as CSV (I know some programs add extra info, but AFAIK notepad does not)
If you want to import CSV, you must specify FORMAT CSV. A literal newline is not legal in PostgreSQL's default delimited input.
\COPY table FROM '/srv/www/.../CSV.csv' WITH (FORMAT CSV, DELIMITER ',');
Is there anyway to disable QUOTE AS this data distributor is giving out a file that has a set up like,
col1,col2
foo,bar
Some columns are a little more complex
col1,col2
Test outside-"bar' Blah blah` Someone else,What
Now the question: Is there a better way than giving QUOTE AS a character that is assumed not to exist?
\COPY maxmind.country FROM worldcitiespop.txt CSV QUOTE AS '$' HEADER
Where $ is an assumption the character doesn't exist?
You don't need to know that the quote character doesn't exist, csv formats can escape quotes if necessary. You should just pick the appropriate dialect for what worldcitiespop.txt contains.