Re: COPY formatting

Tom Lane wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> > Lee Kindness wrote:
> >> To be honest this idea strikes me as overkill - over
> >> engineering.
> >> 
> > I agree. My modest proposal for handling CSVs would be to extend the 
> > DELIMITER parameter to allow up to 3 characters - separator, quote and 
> > escape. Escape would default to the quote char and the quote char would 
> > default to unspecified.
> 
> I could go with that too.  The question here is do we have any popular
> use-cases that aren't solved by that extension, but could be solved by
> simple user-level data formatting functions?  I'm not real eager to add
> such a feature as an "if we build it they will come" speculation, but
> if anyone can point to solid use-cases besides handling CSV, then it
> probably is worth doing.

The thing I liked about Andrew's idea is that it even covers escape
quoting for CVS, which might change from implementation to implentation,
and it is flexible without requiring C coding.

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