Re: PL/PGSQL and external (flat ASCII) files - Urgent ... :)

Chris,

Hmmph.  People are in a bad mood this week; obviously few other people
on the list have had to write applications for the banking industry,
which trades everything in flat files.  Give Chris a break!

> >From an input file where the records looks like this one:
> 
> 020-13 016-05 07-15-2001 23:59:07 00:00:59   09678634321208
> 78634321208
>              0000005300                 ^M

The answer to your question is somewhat annoying, though:  You can't use
PL/pgSQL for this task.  Basically, two other PostgreSQL function
languages - PL/tcl and PL/perl - have excellent text-parsing ability.
As such, there is no movement affort to replicate that functionality in
PL/pgSQL.

So:  Hire yourself a perl or tcl hacker.  Have them write parsing
functions in pl/tclU or pl/perl to load the records.  Then have your
PL/pgSQL function call the tcl or perl functions.

You'll need to get advice from other list members or the docs (and don't
forget the "non-FAQ Documentation" page!)  on how to use these other
languages, as I have had no need for them, to date.

-Josh



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