Re: Plan for CSV handling of quotes, NULL

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?

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