CSV hack

Kind people,

I've come up with yet another little hack, this time for turning 1-d
arrays into CSV format.  It's very handy in conjunction with the
array_accum aggregate (can this be made a standard aggregate?) in
<http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/xaggr.html>.

Here 'tis...

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION csv(anyarray) RETURNS TEXT AS
'DECLARE   in_array ALIAS FOR $1;   temp_string TEXT;   quoted_string TEXT;   i INTEGER;
BEGIN   FOR i IN array_lower(in_array, 1)..array_upper(in_array, 1)   LOOP       IF in_array[i]::TEXT ~ ''"''
THEN          temp_string := ''"'' || replace(in_array[i]::TEXT, ''"'', ''""'')  || ''"'';       ELSE
temp_string:= in_array[i]::TEXT;       END IF;       IF i = array_lower(in_array, 1)       THEN           quoted_string
:=temp_string;       ELSE           quoted_string := quoted_string || '','' || temp_string;       END IF;   END LOOP;
RETURNquoted_string;
 
END;
' LANGUAGE 'plpgsql';

Those DBD::Pg users among us who'd like to be able to bind_columns to
postgresql arrays may have a leg up with Text::CSV_XS.

Other middleware should be able to handle such things, too. :)

Cheers,
D
-- 
David Fetter david@fetter.org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 510 893 6100    cell: +1 415 235 3778