How are you attempting to restore the table after using psql? Psql insert statements? Pgdump? COPY FROM? Mike On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 17:59 -0800, felix@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > I have a table which has a few VARCHAR columns whose first character > is a tab. If I run pg_dump on this table, it outputs data like this: > > 43158 \t555-1212 3 > > where the two embedded white spaces are actually tabs. > > If I use psql to execute SQL to dump parts of the table, like this: > > psql -qtA -f '\t' -U xyzzy xyzzy -c 'select ... >/tmp/xxx > > I get this: > > 43158 310-319-1333, x1070 3 > > where that initial embeded white space represents two tabs. When I > use psql to restore this data, it thinks the 2nd column is empty and > complains that the third column is the wrong type. > > pg_dump apparently is smart enough to print embedded tabs as escaped > chars, but not psql. Is there a fix for this? I thought of reverting > to standard output, without the -t option, and analyzing the first two > lines to tell exactly how many spaces are assigned to each column, but > that gives me the shudders. >
