Re: multiline CSV fields

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Andrew Dunstan wrote:

> Longer term I'd like to be able to have a command parameter that 
> specifies certain fields as multiline and for those relax the line end 
> matching restriction (and for others forbid multiline altogether). That 
> would be a TODO for 8.1 though, along with optional special handling for 
> first line column headings.
> 

Endlessly extending the COPY command doesn't seem like a winning 
proposition to me and I think if we aren't comfortable telling every user 
to write a script to pre/post-process the data we should instead provide a 
bulk loader/unloader that transforms things to our limited COPY 
functionality.  There are all kinds of feature requests I've seen 
along these lines that would make COPY a million option mess if we try to 
support all of it directly.

- skipping header rows
- skipping certain data file columns
- specifying date formats
- ignoring duplicates
- outputting an arbitrary SELECT statement

Kris Jurka