Re: [GENERAL] copy from file with null date fields

David,  Thanks for your help.  I did have null values represented as
zero-length strings.  I'll just run these files through a sed script
to replace the zero-length strings with "\N".


David Hartwig writes:
 > How are you representing NULL in the source file.   Blank or zero length
 > strings are not NULL.   They are treated as illegal dates.   I believe
 > "\N" is used to represent NULL in the copy in/out.
 >
 > William D. McCoy wrote:
 >
 > > I'm running Postgres 6.3.2 on a Sparc20 running Solaris 2.5.1 and I'm
 > > having difficulty copying data from certain text files where fields
 > > expected to be type 'date' are null.  When the copy encounters the
 > > null field it stops and prints the message:
 > >
 > > ERROR:  Bad date external representation
 > >
 > > I have purposely _not_ defined the field as 'not null'.  I have not
 > > had trouble reading from files where other types of fields are null.
 > >
 > > Any ideas, or is this a known bug?

--
William D. McCoy
Geosciences
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA  01003